


In Rotten Apples

by Whelm



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: A Relationship Which Is As Painful As It Is Comfortable, Dog training, Hatred of Mobile Phones, Jacobi Trying To Deal (Just In General), Kepler Trying To Retrace His Steps And Reclaim His Humanity, M/M, Post-space alternate ending, There aren't any good decisions left to be made
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-22 18:27:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13172682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whelm/pseuds/Whelm
Summary: Two men and a Dog are trapped on a deserted wooden island. None of them find a Genie bottle, and none of them would wish to go home if they did because:1) One of them had a home, and now she’s dead.2) Another one killed her.3) The third is a dog who has a blanket and a man that she loves, and both of those are here. She’s fine. It’s fine. It’s all fine.Plus: Bureaucracy Buddies, Lady Macbeth, The Worst Joke Ever Told, another bad idea upon a pile of already pretty bad ideas, goth nail polish, a disgusting amount of burpees, and the comfort of “Normalcy”Alternate Ending written en mass and posted too late.





	1. I'll not budge an inch

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this long before the finale came out, and so it doesn't entirely line up with canon, and Kepler's left trying to reclaim his humanity seven years late.

 

It’s early spring when a familiar stranger shows up at the door of Jacobi's fire lookout. He’s just moved himself and Dog into the little twelve-by-twelve room for the summer, where it’s nice and it’s isolated. Where he can be miserable in peace, Dog can be aggressively affectionate and hyperactive in peace, and they can just get along. Peacefully.

It’s not _completely_ uncommon for people to knock on his door. It’s up a pretty intense flight of stairs, true, but it’s also the only structure for miles and miles on end. When a hiker gets lost, they come and they find the building, and if he’s not there because he’s out taking Dog for a walk, there’s a little sign that says he’ll be back soon. Sometimes there’s a little lockbox of power-bars, and water bottles. Sometimes there isn’t.

The notable difference this time is that the man shows up in the early spring, when the wind is wicked and brutal, and sometimes snow still falls on his peak. Not a lot of people go hiking around this time—or, at least—not a lot of people go hiking _this far._

Jacobi can see the man approach from when he crests the peak of the mountain, since he’s coming from a distance off, and Dog pokes her head up, and then looks to Jacobi, and then looks back to the figure. She stands on her stringy legs to begin pacing, and her slightly pointed ears wave a little as she starts barking but Jacobi doesn’t get up to greet the traveler.(Maybe that’s a little rude, but maybe he’s a little rude, and maybe that’s why he’s perfectly fucking suited for this job).

Ten minutes later, there’s a knock at his door, and Jacobi gets up, and pretends that he hasn’t been counting down the time since he noticed the figure.

“Hey neighbor,” he says, because deep down he’s the same sarcastic asshole that got shot into space. “If you’re looking for a cup of sugar—”

The man shuffles a step back, almost like he’s shocked, but he _can’t_ be.

“Hello,” he says, “Mister…” and then he pauses. “Da—” he starts, but then stops again. “Jacobi,” he finally says, quietly. It’s almost unsure, like it’s not what he wanted to say.

“How—why are you here?”

“A cup of...sugar?” Kepler suggests.

“For you? Nothing but poison.”

Kepler’s lips draw back from his teeth, and it’s not a smile, but it’s not the same way he used to bare his teeth when Jacobi worked under him.

Dog decides she’s had enough of waiting, and she forces her way past Jacobi’s hip  and through the door, bumping into Kepler, who draws his hands up (one of them under a worn leather glove) for her to sniff, and she licks them, tail wagging amiably.

“Sic him, girl,” Jacobi says to his dog. “Tear his trachea out.”

She starts licking Kepler’s leather glove with interest.

“Who is this?” Kepler asks, and Jacobi remembers with resignation that Kepler  _likes_ dogs.

“Dog,” Jacobi says.

“Does she have a name?”

“Yeah. Dog.”

Kepler looks him in the eye for the first time in something near seven years. Jacobi raises his eyebrows, daring him to say something.

“Alright,” Kepler says after a long pause, turning away. “What breed is she?”

“Who knows,” Jacobi says. “A good one. A mutt.” He pauses. “Not a retriever, that’s for sure.”

“Look at that smile,” Kepler says, coming down on one knee. Dog buries her face in his, attacking him with her tongue, and he barely leans away. “She’s gotta be a little bit Pit Bull.”  
“If she was, maybe she’d have gotten you already.”

“You haven’t trained her for that,” Kepler snorts, low and genuine, and all of a sudden Jacobi’s ribs hurt, and all of a sudden he’s furious, and all of a sudden he wants Kepler either dead, or out of his sanctuary.

“What are you here for, S—”

He almost catches himself too late. The pause is audible. Kepler looks up at him from where he’s kneeling and there’s something unreadable in his eyes.

“What do you want from me,” he settles for. Kepler looks down at Dog, drawing his hand up the column of her throat to start scratching her behind the ears.

“Dog,” Jacobi says sternly, maybe a little angrily, “get inside.”

She looks up at him, but licks Kepler.

“Stop petting her," he orders.

Kepler stops, and Jacobi grabs her collar, and tugs her toward the door. She hesitates for a minute, looking around and twisting in place, clearly torn, but eventually goes inside. Jacobi shuts the door.

“Have you ever had a dog before, Jacobi?”

“No,” he says pointedly. “I was a little too busy _being_ one.”

Kepler stands and turns away from Jacobi to look down over the mountains. His hair, which was a little salted before, is now almost entirely silvery, only flecked with the original brownish shade of gray. “Training isn’t too hard once you get the handle of it.”

“Thanks,” Jacobi said. “That’s knowledge I couldn’t pay for if I wanted. Beyond what wealth could buy, beyond worth. One could even call it...worthless.”

“Hah,” Kepler says, just like that.

“I want you gone,” Jacobi says, just like that.

Kepler is watching the forest studiously. “I know.”

“So, why are you here, at my job?”

“I never...pegged you as...somebody who’d want a job like this, out in the middle of...nowhere, watching the skyline for smoke, out of the city.”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. _It’s your fault,_ he thinks.

Kepler looks at the horizon for a long while, as though he might see some smoke. When he finally speaks, Jacobi can hear rust and hesitation in his voice, things he’s not used to getting from Kepler. “I came here because I wanted—well, needed—I…”

“You don’t usually lose your words like this, Colonel. I hope you’re not _nervous_.”

“Not a Colonel anymore.”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. “I heard.”

“I had to talk to you again, about—”

“You really don’t. Really, genuinely, you don’t have to. In fact? I don’t want to hear anything about anything from you, and I really, really don’t want to hear her name out of your mouth ever, just in case you were thinking about it. If you had to talk about her, you could’ve done it when we were locked in a space room together, but you didn’t.”

Jacobi laughs, and it’s not funny, and Dog starts scratching at the door behind him. “You didn’t talk about her unless _I_ brought her up, and then it was only to tell me that I was being _over dramatic_.”

It looks like the words sting, Kepler’s eyes tighten and he draws away, but Jacobi has no way of knowing how real that is. Reading Kepler depends on context, and wherever Kepler’s been for the past few years, Jacobi doesn’t know.

“Twenty-eight.” He spits because it feels right, and he and Kepler watch the spit hit the ground, a long way below them.

“I know,” Kepler says.

“You didn’t,” Jacobi says. “Where’ve you spent the last few years?”

Kepler sighs.

Dog scratches higher, claws bouncing off the glass, and Jacobi rests his hand on the doorknob. “Tell me you’re sorry.” Just because he wants to hear it. Just because of curiosity.

“I’m...sorry.” Kepler almost sounds sad, really. There’s a gorgeously tragic waver in his voice. Jacobi almost wonders what happened to drive Kepler out here. He almost gives a shit.

“I don’t forgive you,” Jacobi says, and doesn’t take a second to search for shock in Kepler’s face because he’s too busy bringing his leg back for a swing, and slamming the thick toe of his hiking boot into the bone of Kepler’s shin.

Kepler gasps and stumbles back, (arms pinwheeling until he thuds hard into the metal rail of the stairs) and his face reverts for an exhilarating, awful moment when his mouth and eyes twist into a vicious snarl, and Jacobi opens the door, grabbing Dog’s leash and calling her out with a whistle. He hauls ass past his former commanding officer, and down the metal stairs.

“So long, dickhead!” He yells over his shoulder as Dog (excited by all the action, but probably not totally getting it) leaps around his feet, causing the whole stairway to shudder.

 

* * *

 

When he gets back up the mountain, it’s to the slow beat of wood against axe against stump. Dog is interested, her sort-of-floppy ears perked, and not even bothering to look at Jacobi for fear of missing whatever excitement is happening up top. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her it’s just Kepler scheming something (again? It shouldn’t be again. It _is_ again), which is fine because she doesn’t have the English to understand him.

“When I said _‘_ bye bye, asshole’ I didn’t mean ‘see you in a few hours, I have to walk Dog,’ I meant _‘fuck off,_ I don’t want to see your standard issue buzzcut within ten miles of my perch.’”

Kepler doesn’t pause, picking up a new log, and lining it up with the axe. The first swing embeds the axe in the wood, and the second snaps the log in half.

It’s an exhausting task, and not one Jacobi is fond of.  Dog yanks at her lead, sniffing at Kepler’s legs, and finally Kepler puts down the axe.

Jacobi drops the leash. “Sic him, girl. Rip his dick off.”

Kepler begins to scratch her behind the ears, and her tail wags so fast that it’s just a dark, brownish blur.

“I thought I would chop some wood. How many years have you been coming out here?”

“Oh _thank you_ ,” Jacobi says, “all trespasses are forgiven, now that I have some _lumber_.” Kepler doesn’t laugh. “Anyway, I know you’ve already looked into it, you were the head of Goddard’s Intelligence.”

“Four years,” Kepler admits shamelessly. “How long have you had...The Dog?”

“Dog. Just Dog. Two years.”

“Rescue?”

“Not really. I got her when my neighbor’s dog got knocked up and she—my neighbor—was begging people to take the puppies because otherwise they’d all have to go to the shelter.”

“Ah,” says Kepler. He takes a knee again, and runs his hand up and down Dog’s throat, and she licks his neck while he pets her. “What tricks does she know?”

“Sit,” Jacobi says. Dog doesn’t sit. “Dog,” he says. “Dog, up here, look, look. Dog, look. Hey, good girl. Hey—sit.” Her haunches hit the ground and her tail throws the dust beneath it into the air. She holds eye contact for a second more before she leans back into Kepler, licking him.

Kepler laughs. “I think she likes me.”

“Don’t be so sure, you’re just interesting. New toy.” She starts licking Kepler’s flesh-and-blood-hand, and then she puts it in her mouth, and she starts gently chewing at it, which he permits. “Chew toy.”

“Does she know anything else?”

“Doesn’t have to,” Jacobi says. “We live out on this fucking mountain for most of the year. I don’t need a dog that’s gonna get me a newspaper.”

“Well,” Kepler begins, slow as an iceberg, “training a dog isn’t only about what _you_ need.”

This pricks something in Jacobi, and he reaches down to grab Dog’s lead again. “Oh yeah? And what would you know about it?”

Kepler laughs. “See, back on the farm—”

“The funny thing is, _Sir_ , you weren’t the only one working in the intelligence division.”

After a moment, Kepler breaks the silence. “How much do you know?”

It was Maxwell, actually, who dug it all up, who read The Kepler Files and shared the information Jacobi would care about with him. He doesn’t know how much he knows in proportion to what information Goddard had, only what she shared.

“Everything I need,” he lies.

Kepler doesn’t look at him. “I see.” There’s another long pause. “Well, back in the _city,_ then, we had a couple of dogs. I wasn’t responsible for training the first two, but all the ones that came after were...well, no matter who paid the money, if you’re the one who takes her on her walks, and teaches her how to understand you, and feeds her, and plays with her, she’s yours.”

Jacobi hums, and gets ready to pull Dog back if he has to.

“Do you remember...Orta San Giulio?”

“Oh,” says Jacobi, “the one where you put me in a suit, dropped me in Italy, and played translator while I fumbled around with a spiked champagne flute, instead of just doing the operation yourself?” He asks this cheerily, sunnily, sarcastically. “No, sorry. That one just slipped my mind.”

They’ve had this argument a thousand times before. _They would’ve recognized me,_ Kepler always says, with the thin, closed-lip smile that means he’s going to be angry soon. _Wear a disguise,_ Jacobi says, because he’s a shithead. _If that was an option, I would’ve,_ Kepler spits.  
  
“Right,” says Kepler, still looking at Dog. Jacobi blinks.

“Now, imagine I wasn’t translating. The whole purpose of the mission was to—”

“Yes,” Jacobi says, “I remember. _I was there_. I was supposed to get the _token of appreciation_ that they thought they owed your fake name.”

“More or less,” Kepler says, and Jacobi wants to punch him. “See, the whole problem is language.”

“Yes,” Jacobi says drily. “That was the problem. That was the problem _all along_.”

“What I’m saying, Mister Jacobi, is that your dog can’t understand you.”

“Yeah. She’s a dog.”

“That’s why obedience training is important, though. You teach your dog concepts, and then between the two of you, you have a language of those concepts. Remember Italy? What that felt like?”

Hopefully it’s a rhetorical question, because Jacobi keeps his mouth shut.

“You’ve got your dog in a world made by humans, for humans. She’s relying on you to translate the world for her, and tell her what she needs to do, and how to interact with that world.”

“She’s not stupid. Dogs have lived for like, thousands of years. She’s fine.”

“Yes,” Kepler agrees, “she probably is.. _.fine_ , but wouldn’t it be that much better if she could rely on you to be her guide?”

Dog has made her way back to Jacobi’s legs, and he runs a hand down her back, and pats her side.

“Alright,” he mutters, “what’ve you got?”

Kepler smiles slowly.


	2. No Profit Grows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the day i don't mention his most famous speech is the day i die i'm so sorry

 

Kepler is touchy. Jacobi can’t decide if Kepler has always been this hands-on and he just didn’t care before now or if the touching is new, but either way it’s disconcerting. He grips Jacobi’s shoulder (lightly) when he passes him, or puts his hand on the space between his shoulder blades when he’s approaching from behind. When he’s showing Jacobi how to do the hand motion for one of the tricks, he physically takes Jacobi’s hand, and leads him through the motions.

It’s entirely unnecessary, and how natural it feels, how used to Kepler’s presence he is, makes it all the more upsetting. After a couple incidents of this, he makes a point of keeping a few feet of open air between them.

Dog throws herself at the both of them, joyful and excited to learn (and excited to get more treats and attention) and, thankfully, she returns to Jacobi’s side after every trick, and she looks to him while she’s being taught.

“I think she might be part German Shepherd,” Kepler says.

“Sure,” replies Jacobi. “Could be.”

 

* * *

 

He tells Kepler to sleep elsewhere, but then it snows, and reluctantly he lets Kepler into his home-on-stilts, but tells him he has to sleep on the floor. To his credit, Kepler doesn't offer a word of complaint, or even a noise of disapproval, he just thanks Jacobi, rolls his jacket up, stokes the fire, and lays down on the wood.

 

* * *

 

Kepler is drinking a glass of whisky (of _course_ he brought some with him. _“Unnecessary”_ his ass. Kepler couldn’t stop drinking the shit if he tried) while Jacobi radios another tower. Both of them are sitting on the floor with Dog between them, bathing in the sickly orange light of sunset.

“Fucking racoons,” Mike, from the south tower, says tiredly. “And the coyotes too. Those fucking things are incredible, ain’t scared of me, ain’t scared of anything I wave at ‘em, ain’t scared of shit. You got Dog with you?”

“Yep. Sleeping on my leg.”

“Tell her I say hi.”

Jacobi pulls his face away from the radio. “Mike says hi,” he whispers. Dog's ear twitches. Kepler pats her side.

“Make sure you take good care of her and don’t let those coyotes near. I’m sure she’s tough as nails but those wild dogs are...well, they’re something else.”

“We’ve got her,” Jacobi says. “Training her how to like, stay close and aware of her surroundings right now, actually. She’s doing pretty well.”

“We?” Mike laughs. “You got somebody with you?”

“Oh.” Somehow, Jacobi is surprised by the question. “Yeah, an old…” he pauses. Kepler looks at him; he looks at Kepler. His chest feels tight.

“Somebody from work,” Jacobi says. “My old job.”

Mike laughs again, but quieter. “Bureaucracy buddy?”

“Something...like...that.” Kepler says, loud and very slow, trying to be heard.

“Alright,” Mike says. “Well, Nice to meet you—or, hear you, really. I gotta go do my work though, and then probably get to bed after that.”

“Good talking to you.”

“Same here.”

Jacobi puts the radio down on the floor, and leans back into the bed frame.

“Bureaucracy...buddy.”

Jacobi snorts. “I know, I know. I told him I worked a, uh, desk job.”

“Mister Jacobi, I’ve never seen you so much as sit at a desk in all the time I’ve known you,” Kepler says with his familiar, almost-smug humor.

Jacobi feels himself ice over, and it’s slow, and cold, and empty. “Are we doing that?”

“What?”

“ _Mister_ Jacobi?”

Kepler pauses. “If there’s anything you’d rather be called…”

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I’d rather you didn’t call me at all.” There’s a couple beats of silence, and maybe a hundred years ago when he cared about Kepler, that wouldn’t be true, or he’d feel bad about saying it, but maybe a hundred years ago Kepler would’ve called him an idiot, or maybe just killed him or something.

Now he just stares, not quite blank, not quite sad. “I could call you D—”

“Nope,” Jacobi says. “No, you really, _really_ couldn’t. That’s hers.”

Dog thumps her tail on the ground in the silence. Kepler goes back to scratching her, just under the ear.

“I don’t forgive you,” Jacobi said.

“I know, I don’t—”

“ _And_ ,” Jacobi says, because he doesn’t care what Kepler has to say, “I probably never will.”

He’s sitting on the floor, a short distance away from Kepler. He could reach over and touch him if he wanted, punch him. It's a delicious fantasy, thinking about that knuckle-to-cheek connection, about hitting him so hard that the bones in his hand shatter.

“Once we get to the part of the training where you teach her how to sic, I’m going to have her tear you to pieces.”

“She wouldn’t like that,” says Kepler, calmly.

“Just...following...orders,” Jacobi breathes without breaking eye contact. Kepler’s right, he wouldn’t do it. Not like that. “I have a gun.”

Kepler feigns interest, raising his eyebrows, leaning back. “Is that legal?”

“Oh, _of course._ I’d never dream of doing something illegal, or underhanded. I’ve always, always been the model of law-abiding citizen.” Kepler chuckles, but the tension is still so palpable that Jacobi could reach out and play it like a guitar.

“By all means,” Kepler says.

So Jacobi gets up, and he reaches into the little box in his desk where he keeps the gun and he pulls it out. It's cold and wonderfully heavy in his hand. He sits down next to Kepler, doesn’t flip off the safety yet, but he puts it right there, right against Kepler’s temple. Kepler lifts his glass again to take a small sip of that nasty, burnt-cork shit he likes so much. His eyes flicker over and come to rest on Jacobi’s. They’re sharp, even despite Kepler’s strange behavior. That same asphalt grey, and Jacobi still gets a jolt looking into them.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Kepler blinks, real slow, like he's flirting. “Like what?”

“Like this doesn’t matter.” Jacobi says, “Like you’re in control, like you’re not worried.” He remembers Kepler’s expression of shock, of fear, like the whole world was torn out from under him back on the Hephaestus, and how good it felt to finally have beaten him.

“I’m not worried,” Kepler says, quietly. “Do I look like I’m in control?”

“I don’t know,” Jacobi says. “Yes. You do.”

Kepler laughs, but there's something painful about it, in the way his eyes squint shut, perhaps. The tip of the gun’s barrel skirts through the almost-white hair on the side of his head. “Force of habit,” he says.

“But you’re not worried.”

“Not about the gun, no.”

Jacobi doesn’t lower his arm. “Suicidal, or—”

“If you wanted to kill me, you could probably kill me. You probably could’ve done it much earlier.” He doesn’t mention Minkowski, which is fine.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t make me sick.”

“That’s...true,” Kepler's eyes leave Jacobi's to linger on the floor.

Jacobi puts the gun down, stands up, and puts it in its box. Dog opens her beautiful brown eyes and hauls herself to her feet. Behind her, her tail swings wildly back and forth. Kepler pats her side, and Jacobi reaches right up under her chin and scratches her there.

“She was like—” Jacobi sucks in a deep breath. “She was a sister to me, like,” he's struggling for the words, and Kepler stays mercifully silent for once. “She was brilliant, and so clever, and better than either of us—both of us put together! And she, like, she was _special._ To me.” His throat is thick. How much has she thought of her, and still, his throat goes and solid and unspeaking with the pain of her loss. It takes him whole minutes to recover from even just this, sitting there with his hand cupped around Dog’s forgiving face, petting her mechanically.

“She was family,” Jacobi says, and then he laughs so hard that it startles Dog, who barks. “And look! Her, with her parents—and me, with mine, and you, with your fucking mother, and your fucking father—” He falls into peals of miserable, wretched laughter, the only sound in a mile, probably.

“It’s just, it’s fitting, isn’t it?” Kepler is silent throughout this speech, and it hits Jacobi with a burst of happywrong-Monster-thrill that, oh, _right,_ none of them were allowed to mention Kepler’s family. The implicit threat of digging too deep, of hitting a switch on a man that had no deep qualms about hurting them stood in the way. And now? for whatever reason, Kepler is just sitting there, staring at him, and Jacobi laughs. He’s laughing at Kepler, or maybe at himself, or maybe he’s just getting as close to crying as his FUBAR body lets him.

“Three shitty people from shitty homes with shitty parents make a shitty little work-family, and the guy in charge gets one killed because he can’t fucking trust the other two.” Jacobi takes off his glasses, and drags his hands down his face. He starts laughing again, and Dog noses his elbow. “And I thought the joke about the pig was bad—shit,” his lungs hurt, and his voice cracks and warps wetly. “This is so much worse.”

 

* * *

 

“Why are you here?”

For the past few days they’ve been teaching Dog how to walk at Jacobi’s heel, rather than pulling so hard at her leash, and now they’re taking her on a walk to try it out again in a more distracting environment. Every few feet, Jacobi will call Dog’s attention to him, and she’ll hold back a bit, and he’ll slip her a treat.

Kepler is trailing behind them, and he’s silent but Jacobi is patient, and Jacobi’s gotten good at dealing with silence over the past few years, and so he waits, and he pets Dog, but doesn’t offer any distractions or ways out of the conversation. Sure, Kepler could just sprint off into the fucking woods if he wanted to, and Jacobi wouldn’t follow, couldn’t make him say anything, but he won’t. For whatever reason, he won’t. He wants to be here.

“I had...a lot of time...to think,” Kepler says. Jacobi _already_ has questions, but it’s a rare opportunity to hear Kepler talk about himself and not fill the air with overconfident ramble.

“And,” Kepler says quietly, “I thought...I...wanted...to...see...you. Again.”

“Where were you?”

“I’d...rather not, Jacobi.”

Jacobi sucks in a breath. “Is there a sniper,” he asks with affected, vicious cheer, “following you around? In the woods? Or a Goddard Drone that’s ready to kill you _and me_ if you spill the beans?”

“No.”

“Are you not allowed to tell me because I defected?”

“No.”

“Good, because I would’ve shot you for that. Maybe not fatally. Maybe just in the foot or something. Is it just personal reasons?”

“Almost.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“No,” Kepler says, edge creeping back into his voice “Are you going to _drop it?”_

Jacobi laughs. Dog looks up at him, and he pats her back.

“Just tell me. Tell me or you can hike your ass home, if you can even remember the way.” There’s a few moment’s pause, and Jacobi holds Dog’s leash tight as she stares longingly at a pile of undoubtedly interesting-smelling mushrooms.

“Solitary. Goddard’s solitary.”

“Oh,” Jacobi says after a moment, not lightly. Guarded. “How was that?”

“Very...efficient,” he breathes. Jacobi waits him out.

“Because of the amount of... _technology_ they can afford to waste on pet projects like this, they’ve streamlined and perfected the methods used in prison. AIs handle the observation, the food chutes—almost everything. They don’t talk either, but they can beep. It’s like the old models but no text box. Not for me, at least.” He doesn’t explain this in the way he tells his usual stories. Instead, the words come in rough chunks, bits and spurts of the story, somehow both sounding like he’s reading it off of a lengthy and dull mission report, and like he’s talking about a fractured dream that’s already slipping away.

“How’d you escape?”

Kepler laughs, long, and dry, and cracked. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. “I didn’t.” He’s not looking at anything specifically and when Jacobi catches a glimpse of his eyes they're unfocused and far away. Kepler runs a hand over his face. Dog pulls at her leash, and Jacobi stops, and calls her to him, and they take a few steps backwards and try again. He gives her a treat.

“Good girl,” Kepler says from a few feet away, hands in his pockets.

“How’d you get out then?”

“The Goddard Investigation started, and after a while they started to dig into the deeper levels, and they found—”

“You.”

“Me,” Kepler agrees. “There was so much to...investigate, and so much going on—I slipped away in the confusion.”

“You weren’t being guarded? You were like, Cutter’s top man.”

There’s another pause.

“On the record,” Kepler says.

“On the record,” Jacobi agrees.

“I don’t think they knew that at the time, or if they did, I didn’t seem like much of a threat—"

 _That’s_ hard for Jacobi to believe.

“—so, when I slipped away, it wasn’t a big production.”

“Do you think they’re looking for you?”

“Possibly.”

Jacobi slows to a stop, and Dog wanders away, starting to sniff at some of the brush.

“So you came here to hide out?”

“I suppose this is as good a place as any if I wanted to, but no. Not quite.”

“We get hikers,” Jacobi says, “and hunters, but you’re not wrong. Tons of people don’t even know this is a thing, that we’re out here.”

“How’d you get into it?”

“Some kid heard me talking about like, never wanting to be around people ever again, and he was like ‘oh, there’s this thing, my uncle is a lookout, that’s where you just go live in a tower in the middle of nowhere for like half a year, and then you never talk to anyone except over radio’ and I was like...sign me up.”

“Doesn’t sound like something you’d take to.”

“Oh,” Jacobi laughs, “you’d be surprised. Anyway, I figured anything could be better than being locked in that Hephaestus room with you, and there’s fire out here. Free-range fire, just, burning shit. Like fire is meant to.”

“Pyromaniac,” muses Kepler.

“Maybe. Everyone is, just a little.”

They both take a long, deep breath, and Dog returns to Jacobi’s side after a little encouragement.

“It’s incredibly green out here for a mountainside that’s going to catch on fire,” Kepler says.

“Well, lets hope we don’t get a fire this close to my watchtower, but yeah. The fires are like, good for the soil and shit.”

“Enlightening, Jacobi.” Kepler says.

“Nobody ever told you I’m the pinnacle of knowledge? That I wrote the textbook on writing textbooks? They like, I don’t know, break down the nutrients and vitamins in plants and put that back in the dirt. They burn the greenery and leave huge and awful burn-scars on the mountains and shit, but the scars are also really, really fucking fertile for something healthy to grow from, because a lot of the time the nasty, invasive stuff was burned away.”

“So it’s not your job to make sure the fire’s get put out?”

“Not really. I just watch, take readings, measurements, and call in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder that Kepler's metaphorical whisky has ever actually been unnecessary, that the dude isn't just kidding himself so he can keep this image of like, Big Tough Kepler Who Never Needs Anyone.


	3. Profit You In What You Read?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I should warn you that, from here on out there will be some more specific references to Kepler and Jacobi's respective childhoods and, therefore, child abuse.

It’s finally warm enough to be out at night, and so they’re both lying on a picnic blanket beside the tower, and staring up at the stars, and feeling weird about it because they’ve been up there, and it was probably the worst thing either of them have gone through together, but damn if the stars aren’t pretty from all the way down here, blessedly bound to the earth.

“I don’t think I’d mind sleeping out here,” Kepler says.

“Fantastic. I’ll let the Coyotes know.”

Kepler laughs. “They wouldn’t kill a human, not one as big as me anyway.”

“Yeah, not a big one that was making noise, but if you’re sleeping—”

“I’d wake up.”

“Well, if you end up mauled in the early hours of the morning, I’m going to use all the skills I learned while working under you to forge a will, get it notarized, and spend all of your money paying for a dog therapist to provide therapy for my traumatized dog after she has to see me dispose of your mutilated corpse.”

Hearing her name, Dog looks up, and then settles her head back down and starts licking Jacobi’s hand.

“Did I tell you about the time that I _was_ a dog therapist?”

“Give me strength,” Jacobi mutters. “No. No, you didn’t.” He breathes in deeply, and then exhales. Kepler lapses into that strange not-Kepler silence beside him. He holds it for long enough that, to Jacobi’s own surprise, he’s the first to crack.

“Okay, I have two questions.”

“Yes...Jacobi?”

“One, where was this?”

“North Dakota,” Kepler says fondly.

“Figures. Two, did you have one of those little one-arm-couches, but for dogs?”

Kepler smiles, slow and coy and playful and he breaks off into that slow, sesame-street The Count laugh. “I might’ve.”

“What dogs did you have?” Jacobi asks, “Back in Chicago, when you were a kid.”

“Hm?”

“When you were talking about like, dog obedience or whatever. You said you had dogs, didn’t you?”

“Ah,” Kepler hums high in his throat. “Yes. Before I was born, my mother had a Poodle-Lab mix, and when I was growing up we had a Lab, and when I was young, but not too young, they got a Lab-Pit Bull, and he was mine.” Kepler smiles, sharp with pride or smugness, and he glances from the stars to Jacobi.

“That’s a lot of Lab. How old were you?”

“Thirteen,” Kepler says. “Puck. He was the sweetest dog you’ve ever seen, and he’d sleep up with me on the bed, and when my father told me that wasn’t alright, he’d sleep on the floor just beside me, and I’d reach down, and he’d lick my hand.” Kepler raises his gloved, cyborg hand, and flexes it. “My father told me...what to tell him...and so I told him, and...he would do it.”

Jacobi’s heard enough of Kepler’s speeches to know it’s not over, and so he holds quiet.

“But he did it,” Kepler whispers, “because I told him to. He would look at me. He would listen to my father, of course, I told him to. I taught him to listen to other people, but he...would look...at me.”

“And what about the other dog? You said there were two.”

“She was a doberman. I called her Lady,” Kepler says, and listening harder this time, Jacobi can hear the affection in his voice, raw and rusty and incredibly surreal.

_“Lady?”_ Jacobi asks.

“Lady... _Macbeth_ ,” Kepler says. Jacobi snorts.

“You’re fucking awful. How was she?”

“She was...the best. My father saw that I could train Puck, and he thought he might like something, a little _bigger,_ ” Kepler says, deepening his voice, giving Jacobi a performance of a dead man he’s never met. “A little more _intimidating_.” He breaks the impression. “A little less silly. Puck would snore, and lick everyone who came near him.”

“Cute.” Jacobi says. “Lady didn’t?”

“Not everyone,” Kepler said.

“Wait,” Jacobi says, and he rolls over so that he’s on his elbows, and Kepler is a head or so below him. “Hold on. You’re telling me that you liked Shakespeare as a kid? As in you, teenage Kepler, enjoyed Shakespeare enough to name both your dogs after it?”

Kepler’s face doesn’t change, and he can sort-of see it under the light of the waxing moon.

“It. Was. Fun,” Kepler says, and it sounds so much like _Colonel_ Kepler that Jacobi grimaces and pulls away, dropping onto his back a small distance farther than where he started.

“You’re disgusting, but continue.”

“I’d be honored,” Kepler simpers. “There are some dogs which don’t like to deal with anyone but their master, and Lady was one of these dogs. Oh, I trained her to be.. _.receptive_ to commands from my mother, or father, maybe a family friend or two, but you could look her in the eye and see she wasn’t thrilled.”

“But she was thrilled to do tricks for you?”

“Immensely. What did I tell you? I walked her, I played with her, I pet her, I fed her, I took her to the park whenever I had a free hour, and because she was this big, devil-eared dog, most of the people out there would give us some space. I taught her every trick she could learn, and she loved it.” Kepler goes quiet for a moment, and reaches over, scratching the back of Dog’s neck.

“For my mother, she was usually pretty quiet, subdued—sometimes, when I had to be out of the house for longer, my mother would walk her, and she’d...well, she’d be fine for her.”

“And your father?”

A grin creeps across Kepler’s face then, and it’s this strange mix of boyish, mischievous pleasure and that same, smug, awful Kepler who Jacobi wants to pummel. “She _hated_ him. Couldn’t stand that son of a bitch. Imagine, he’s all proud because he got this _Big_ , _Impressive_ dog—a girl, he wanted a boy, but the girl was fine as long as she was tough—and his son trains her to hate him.” Kepler laughs. Ah-ah-ah-ah.

“Did you?” Jacobi asks softly.

“Train Lady to hate him? No, God no. If I thought I could get away with it I might’ve, but she just hated him. Instinctually, maybe. She’d sit, sure, if he told her to sit, and if she was in the mood to do it, but it’d take her a few commands for her to go through with it. With me, though? I only had to say it once, didn’t even need the hand signal. She was so, so clever. Such a clever dog.” He laughs.“She was all elbows, though, she used to sleep next to me and she’d kick—”

“I thought you _just_ said you weren’t allowed to let the dogs on the bed?”

_“Oh,”_ Kepler says. He sounds pleased, like Jacobi asked him a clever question—maybe he’s just glad to know that Jacobi is listening. “Oh I wasn’t, not at all, not until she came along. Puck had to sleep on the ground, but when we got the new puppy, she’d hop up on the bed—and I was sixteen, maybe seventeen then? My father only really came into my room if he wanted to...deal with me, and that was rarely as I was about to sleep, so she got _very_ used to sleeping on my bed, and Puck too eventually—he didn’t like being left out. I think she must’ve had almost two years of it before my father was furious enough that he came to my room that late. He gripped her by the collar—tried to pull her off when I wouldn’t order her off and she wouldn’t listen to him.”

The night is silent aside from the soft noises of breathing and Kepler’s smooth storytelling voice.

“I told him not to,” Kepler says, but he still sounds pleased.

Jacobi’s eyes are fixed on the belt of Orion above them.

“He wasn’t mauled,” Kepler admits. “I don’t think he was even hurt at all, but he was shaken up.”

Another long pause intercepts the story, but Kepler brings it slowly to a close.

“I don’t know if dogs care about families, not human families anyway, but she was brilliant. Smarter than me. I took her lead eventually of course, but that was much later.”

 

* * *

 

 

Getting back to sleep is impossible on account of Kepler having started doing burpees at this unholy hour. It’s all the moving, the jumping and the getting back down and then up again, it excites Dog.

Jacobi yawns as he stands and then he sits back down, fishing the medical kit out from beneath his bed.

The last night had been rough. Kepler had been twisting where he lay on the ground and he’d cried out, which woke Jacobi up. When Jacobi dangled his foot off the bed to nudge him, Kepler almost took his shin out in that post-wakeup-panic. Hours later, it'd been Jacobi's turn to jolt awake from a nightmare, which either woke Kepler up, or Kepler had been awake for the whole time, but then it upset Dog, who wouldn’t stop pawing at Jacobi, and now, at 0447, they’re all awake, they’re all a little sleep deprived, and they’re all a little on edge.

Jacobi takes his bottle and needles out. “What number are you up to?”

“Four,” gasps Kepler, “Fifty,” He hits the ground “Eight.”

_“Fuuuuuucked up_ ,” breathes Jacobi as he hooks up the first needle. “I don’t know how I feel about you doing those in here. You kind of shake the tower a bit. I’ve got to make sure the firefinder is still level later.”

Dog, who has been watching Kepler exercise and wagging her tail, barks. Jacobi looks up. “Hey,” he says. “Eyes. Eyes, Dog—good girl. Hush.” She looks at him, and then back to Kepler, and then back to him. “Just wait, girl. He can go on a Whiskey Alpha Lima Kilo later,” Jacobi says as he cleans the cap. When he’s done with that, he punctures the rubbery membrane on the bottle.

“Hold up,” Jacobi says to Kepler. “You’re going to want to stop that for a hot minute so I can do this without screwing up.” Out of the periphery of his vision, he can see Kepler slow to a stop and then haul himself into a kneeling position. He flicks the jar a little, then rights the syringe, and pulls out the smaller needle.

“Thanks,” Jacobi says. “You can start up again once I finish.”

“I think,” Kepler pants, leaning heavy on his arms, “I’m done...for now.”

Jacobi laughs and shuffles the waistband of his sweatpants down to his knees, and then starts cleaning a spot on his thigh. “Aren’t you too old to be doing that shit anyway? You’re like, what, fifty?”

“Forty...seven.”

“You can’t keep doing like, five hundred burpees forever.”

“I can’t not do it,” Kepler says, and something about the way he says it gets Jacobi’s attention, and he looks up at Kepler, but then looks back down at his thigh, and decides to finish what he started first.

“Solitary?” Jacobi asks once the needle is out and he’s rubbing the spot.

Kepler gives him a flat, suspicious look.“What.”

“The Burpees, were you—”

“Yes.” He runs his hand over the back of his neck and turns away from Jacobi. “Something to do, to keep busy.”

“They didn’t give you anything to read?”

There’s a long pause, so long that Jacobi pulls his pants back up, and calls Dog over to him (she puts her head in between his legs and gives him those “please please please walk me I am So cute and I am So bored and I do Not care that the sunrise isn’t here yet” eyes).

“One thing to read,” Kepler says. “ _The Taming of The Shrew._ ”

“Oh,” Jacobi says. “Isn’t that Shakespeare?”

Kepler makes a disgusted, guttural noise. _“Barely.”_

Jacobi’s lip twists. “I’m fairly sure it has his name on it.”

“I’m not one to buy into the Shakespeare-was-a-fraud conspiracy, but I might make an exception, just for this one.”

“Wow,” Jacobi says drily.

“That, or it was one of his early plays and he hadn’t found his genius yet.”

“And so they only gave you the one book?”

Kepler laughs humorlessly. It sounds almost the same as his normal laugh, except much darker and Jacobi can see in his face that he’s on the warpath. “One.” He says. “If only.”

“I’m...not following.”

“Over the course of my internment, I was given, I believe, every single edition of _The Taming Of The Shrew_ that they could slip through the chute. There were some, I am dead certain, from before the Victorian era.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Kepler’s lips pull back from his teeth. “‘ _Thus have I politicly begun my reign,_ ’” he hisses.

“‘ _And ’tis my hope to end successfully._ __  
_My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,_ __  
_And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged,_  
For then she never looks upon her lure,

_Another way I have to man my haggard,_ _  
_ _To make her come and know her keeper’s call._

_That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites_ __  
_That bate and beat and will not be obedient._ __  
_She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat._  
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.’”

Jacobi raises his eyebrows and stands, calling Dog to his side with a pat, and clipping the leash to her collar. “You memorized that?”

“I have the whole play memorized.”

“I don’t want you to prove it.”

Kepler snorts. “I don’t want to prove it either.”

“Then we’re in agreement,” Jacobi says, “this play is no longer to be mentioned, quoted, or acknowledged.”

“Referred to from here on out—” Kepler says, and then catches Jacobi’s eye and amends “— _if._..the need arises—as the _unspeakable_ production.”

“Agreed. Now get your shoes on. We’re headed into town.”

Kepler stares at him. “Into town? I thought you had to watch for fires.”

“I do, I get a few days off occasionally, and I need to get some supplies, and you need to get some more clothes, and I need to get more treats for Dog, because she’s going through them fast. Get to the trailhead, I’m just going to close this place down.”

 

* * *

 

 

“So, where’re you from?” The corner store cashier has a black bob, a curious smile, and orange lipstick.

Kepler laughs the same way he would’ve seven years ago. His back is proudly straight, and his hands rest clasped before him. “Well,” Kepler begins the way he always begins when he’s going to tell some long, elaborate lie about his life, “funny story about—”

Jacobi stomps on his foot.

The reaction is an instantaneous recoil of pain on Kepler’s end, and he gives Jacobi a sharp, shocked look.

“Fuck, did I do that?” Jacobi asks loudly, making a show of looking down at Kepler’s foot.  “Sorry, you know how clumsy I am,” Jacobi says affectedly. He turns his gaze back to the cashier, and pulls one corner of his mouth up in a half hearted reassurance. “I have two left feet. Anyway, I’m working up in the mountains, just, y’know up there. Fire prevention.”

Apparently recovering, Kepler smiles tightly, and drops a heavy hand on Jacobi’s shoulder.

“He’s staying with me for a bit,” he adds as Kepler’s grip tightens and a familiar burst of adrenaline shoots through him.

The cashier’s lips are still orange, but are no longer curved into a bowish smile, and so Jacobi grabs his bags, and passes Kepler his.

“Alright,” she says. “See y’all around then?”

“Sure,” Jacobi says. Kepler’s hand (it’s the flesh one, although he’s got gloves over both now) remains on his shoulder, and Jacobi passes his bags over to the hand farthest from Kepler, already mapping this out in his head “Sure.”

“You d—” Kepler starts once they pass through the automatic sliding doors and out onto the barren parking lot, but Jacobi starts at the same time, louder, sharper.

“Get your hand off of my shoulder.”

Kepler’s fingers flex into the flesh and muscle. “I’m sorry?”

“You should be.” Jacobi doesn’t move, but lets his eyes rise to look at Kepler, who’s got his old snarl on. He can feel his heart beating in his throat, because he knows this might not even work. Kepler doesn’t care. Kepler doesn’t give a damn about anyone else—isn’t that the truth? Hasn’t that been the truth all along? “Get. Your hand. Off. My. Shoulder.”

Kepler stares him down. _You don’t want to play this game_ , Jacobi thinks. _You don’t want to play this game with me._

He can feel Kepler’s index finger curl; hooked under the space beneath his collar-bone through his shirt. His thumb is digging into the muscle beside his shoulder blade. Kepler’s eyes are a flat, worn-asphalt gray. He’s still impenetrable, but Jacobi knows him well enough to see that he’s working through it, even if he can’t see the work itself. A neat little list of pro’s and cons. Goddard’s best lawyer, and Goddard’s best executor (on the record).

“As...you...wish,” Kepler mutters, withdrawing his hand, and slipping it into his pocket.

_Good boy,_ Jacobi wants to say. _Figured it out, did you?_ Instead, he puts his bags back in his other hand, and he steps a few feet away from Kepler, who turns to face the road. “Go buy yourself some more whisky or something,” Jacobi says. “I don’t want to see you for the next few hours. If you’re at the car by three, I’ll schlep your ass back up to the mountain, but if you miss that trip, you’re on your own.”

Kepler gives him a long look, and he returns it steadily. Dog tugs at her leash, and Jacobi looks away to untie it, and when he looks back up, Kepler is walking away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things DO get better, eventually! I promise!


	4. Sirrah, begone or talk not, I advise you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, the best thing you can do for somebody is to give them space.

The watch on his wrist blinks a bright teal 3:43, and Jacobi sighs, putting his head back onto the hardwood. It’s cooler here than it is on the bed. His skin is still slick and, even though he was almost cold and clammy when he was pitched from his nightmare by his own adrenaline, the hot, tense air of western summer warmed him up real fast. Beside him, Kepler's legs run parallel to his torso and turn occasionally, a slow, erratic metronome

“Tell me about your dream,” Jacobi says.

“Are you...looking for me...to entertain you?” Jacobi can’t see his face in the dark, but he can imagine it. Hard lines, eyebrows raised at the edges, but furrowed in the middle. There’s a certain amount of predictability there, even if he doesn’t always know what’s beneath the surface level.

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a good story.”

“That’s fine,” Jacobi says. “Your stories are better when they aren’t just a purée of bullshit.”

Dog adjust herself beside Kepler, and then gets up, walks across the both of them, and lies down on Jacobi’s chest, licking his face. She’s as warm as he is (or warmer), but he can’t find it within himself to push her off. He presses his lips into a thin smile and cups the back of her head in his hands.

“What about you?” Kepler asks after a few minutes of silence. “What did you dream about?”

“Alana.” It’s been a long time since he said her name out loud, and it feels strange on his tongue, almost sacred. Old. He holds Dog's ears in his hands, and pets them with his thumbs. “Why are you still here, Kepler? What do you want from me?”

Kepler clears his throat. “I don’t know.”

“You _do,”_ Jacobi  insisted. “You never go into something not knowing. Whatever you’re hiding—whatever you’re _plotting_ , I’m not playing it. I’m not playing your stupid, shitty games, and I’m not going to forgive you.” Jacobi rubs his face roughly, and then Dog starts licking him again, and he gently pushes her head to the side, and then she starts licking his hand, and then works her way back to his face.

“In...solitary...I—” Kepler cuts himself off. It takes two more minutes for him to try again.

“I missed you.” He says it so quietly that Jacobi _almost_ doesn’t hear him, but he does. His heart kicks furiously in his chest, and he sneers into the dark.

“Yeah?” He says it quietly too, but not kindly.

Yesterday, they were training Dog how to retrieve something—genuinely retrieve it, not just grab it to run away, sit down and chew on it. Not making Jacobi run all the way over to coax it from her jaws. Part of this involved Kepler running across the dirt, Dog at his heels, and he was laughing, and Jacobi was laughing, and it wasn’t awful, and afterwards, when they were resting under the shade of the tower, Kepler patted Jacobi’s arm for a moment, and Jacobi didn’t even think to throw him off.

“I missed you too,” he says, low, honest, angry, “but I miss _her_ more.” He takes a long, shaky breath. “Andshe’snot,” he says in a rush. Another breath, longer this time. He knits his fingers together and twists them tight. “She’s not just going to walk up here and...and ask for a cup of sugar.”

The lookout lapses back into silence. It’s a heavy, blanketing silence, like he could scream until his lungs broke down and nobody would hear, like every broken twig is eaten whole by it. The kind of silence that seems loud, because suddenly Jacobi can hear the creaking of his body, and the thrumming of his heart in his ear, and every breath he takes, and every breath Dog takes, and every breath Kepler takes.

“She would hate it up here,” Kepler says

Jacobi’s lungs do a funny twitch, something between a hiccup and a sob, and he laughs (more out of desperation than humor or relief). “Maybe,” he says, “She’d hate that the only tech I have out here is a radio and the firefinder for sure, but I don’t think she’d hate the mountains. I don’t think she’d hate Dog.” His heart and lungs and stomach are tying themselves in knots.“I think...I think she was a cat person. I don’t know. Did she have pets growing up?” She’s slipping. She’s slipping, and he can’t catch her, and she’s gone but she’s slipping and he knows how fucking typical this is, these feelings, is but she’s. God. What he wouldn’t give for just one more day. One more day to memorize everything, to take her with him somehow, like a deep breath before a dive.

Kepler shakes his head. Jacobi can hear the brush of his hair against the wood. “I don’t know that she was a cat or dog person,” he says slowly, “she would probably have been happiest outfitting an AI’s program to function in a mobile body for...companionship. She mentioned the idea once,” he says. “Or twice.”

“Fuck,” Jacobi says. “We could’ve made that happen.”

* * *

Kepler draws his index finger (the robot hand, gloveless this time) between his eyes, staring Dog down. “Look at me,” he says. She does, but her paws dance on the dirt nervously, careening her body back and forth like a tossing ship, when she sits her ears are drawn back. Jacobi sees the whine in her eyes before she even begins to vocalize it.

He’s been pacing in circles behind Kepler, rolling from his heel to his toe to the heel of his other foot and he glances at the bag of treats hanging from Kepler’s belt. “Stop it,” he says sharply.

Dog looks at him, and now she _does_ whine.

“Stop...what?”

“Training. We’re done for the day. We’ve been out here for like, three hours. She’s getting frustrated. We’re done.”

“She _almost_ has it.”

“That’s dandy, that’s just—that’s just swell, Kepler. We’re done here. Dog, come.” Dog stands.

“Dog,” Kepler says, putting his finger between his eyes again. “Stay.”

Dog looks at Kepler, and then at Jacobi. She licks her lips. She hasn’t stopped swaying yet.

“Oh for the love of—you’re kidding me. You have got to be kidding me.”

“I _said_...she almost has it,” Kepler repeats. It’s that same damn false patience bullshit he used to pull in the SI-5. That same tone. Jacobi can already see the way he holds his mouth, the way he looks out from just-slightly lowered eyelids. Kepler had his back to him, but he can see it in his mind’s eye, clear as day. “Who, amongst us two, has experience training dogs? Is it you? _You_ , who didn’t even train your dog to _stay_ before I got here—”

Jacobi snaps.

He doesn’t even realize he’s moving until he darts forward and shoves hard, just beneath Kepler’s shoulders. Kepler stumbles but doesn’t fall, and whips around to face Jacobi, Dog leaps out of the way with a sharp yelp, and runs a wide circle around them.

“She’s _my_ dog!” His voice is raw, and trembles with the force of his rage. “And I said _stop,_ and so we’re going to fucking stop!”

“Mis—” Kepler stops himself. “Jacobi,” he tries again. “I’m simply...teaching her...how to spin...from vocal command...alone.” There’s nobody in the world that deserves a knuckle-sandwich than Kepler, there really isn’t. “We’re almost there. She can handle it.”

“Get out.”

“I’m...sorry?”

“You’re not! You’re really, really not, but you should be. Get out.”

Kepler raises his hands, on either side of him, fingers spread to the sky. Storm clouds are forming far-off, but the sky above them is still a burning blue. Kepler’s metal hand catches the gleam of the sun. “Out where,” Kepler laughs, and it’s his commander laugh, it’s his _This Isn’t Funny, But The Fact That You Think You’re Right Should Be Hilarious_ laugh. “We are out, Jacobi. The most out, the _Great Outdoors_ —”

_“‘She can handle it.’_ ” Jacobi spits the words at Kepler’s feet.

Kepler stills, hands still spread in the air.

“Like I could handle it?” Jacobi asks. “Like Maxwell could—”

His arms come down fast. “Jacobi—”

“Take a long hike off a short cliff, _Colonel.”_

“I was teaching your dog...a trick. The situations are entirely—”

“I don’t care,” Jacobi says. “I don’t want to hear it. Hit the road, Jack.”

Kepler takes a step back. Jacobi knows the gears are grinding in his head.

_“Is he serious?”_ Jacobi says in a comically deep impression of Kepler’s voice that his vocal chords strain to accommodate. _“Is Mister Jacobi throwing some kind of a fit? Is he going to calm down and see reason?”_

Kepler says nothing.

“I can assure you I’m dead serious. It’s like, a one-day hike back to town without the car, and that’s assuming you don’t con some poor shithead into letting you into their car, which you will, because you can.”

“I’m sorry,” Kepler says.

Jacobi laughs riotously. He takes a step forward, and then another, until he’s right up close, and Kepler’s face is inches away. Kepler doesn’t move, or even lean back, but wariness enters his face, and rightly so. Jacobi’s feeling like a wildfire, like he wouldn't mind taking Kepler down another peg, like this has been a long time coming.

“I’m sorry too,” Says Jacobi softly, smiling crookedly, “for stomping on your foot.”

There’s this beautiful moment of confusion on Kepler’s face where Jacobi can, this close, see him thinking through it ( _at the grocery store? That was at least a week ago?),_ but he doesn’t get to comprehension quick enough, and Jacobi’s boot is already coming up.

_“Son of a **bitch!”** _ Kepler howls.

Jacobi leaps away, adrenaline thrumming through his veins, shocked that Kepler’s reflexes have gotten so rusty that he could get away with that not just once, but twice. It’s a power trip. He’s curling and uncurling his fingers. “Isn’t it funny?” He's spitting his words like knives off his tongue, watching them take chunks out of Kepler. “Isn’t it funny how that works? How ‘I’m sorry’ can mean jack shit? How people just—how they can just _say_ that and it’s empty? You’re the same god damn person you always were, and I don’t want that. I don’t want you here.”

“Well,” Hisses Kepler, on his knees and clutching his foot. In this blinding, tunnel view of fury, Jacobi prays that he broke something. “How do I make them mean something then?”

“You’re kidding me! You cannot be this bad at being a fucking human being.” Jacobi runs his hand down over his eyes and keeps it there. “You do better, Kepler. You just—you stop trying to control everything, and pushing and pushing and pushing until something breaks, and you stop...you stop ignoring people when they need you to stop, or need your help—and you just...you do better.”

Jacobi leans down, and grabs Dog’s leash. “And you can do that somewhere else.”

* * *

 “Oh Captain,” Jacobi says, “my Captain.”

“You can just use Lovelace.” She sounds tired, but also more relaxed than he’s ever heard her. “It’s my name, and it’s not like Goddard—”

“I know,” Jacobi says, “but I kinda like saying Captain. It has a nice feel to it. Sharp. Cap- _tain_.”

“I don’t know why I even bother.”

“Me neither,” Jacobi agrees. He’s leaning against the payphone at the entrance to the park. It’s one of his days off, and he’s just restocked his supplies, and so now he’s sitting in the empty cabin and having his monthly call with Lovelace. Her idea—or maybe Minkowski’s. Or maybe Eiffel’s. Definitely not Hera’s.

“How are things?” He asks.

“Things are...they’re things,” she says ponderously. “Things are...going.”

“This is great,” Jacobi says. “This is like, the peak of information transference right here. Remind me why Doug was the communications officer?”

Lovelace snorts. “He had the post when I got there, I couldn’t just uproot him. Anyway, Minkowski is doing better.”

“Was she doing badly before?”

“She got sick, and you know how she is,” Lovelace said. Jacobi hums, because he doesn’t really, but he can guess. “But we got her to just...chill for a while. It was nice, and now she’s doing better. Hera’s systems are still functioning, which is great. I think she’s having fun on barely-functioning internet archives from the early two-thousands. Eiffel is...well.”

“He’s Eiffel?”

“That’s exactly it,” she says. “What about you? How are things in the middle of nowhere?”

“Not burning yet,” Jacobi says. “Very, _very_ unburned.”

“Ooh,” Lovelace laughs, “getting antsy?”

“Me? Antsy to see some fire? Never. I wouldn’t dream of taking a job watching acres of shit burn because I _want_ to watch acres of shit burn.”

“Of course not.”

Silence washes over the conversation, not uncomfortable, but not comfortable either, riding that thin line.

Jacobi ducks his head, and he scuffs the ground with his feet. “Hey, Captain?”

“Yes, Jacobi?”

“Have you heard anything about...the colonel?”

Silence again.

“No,” Lovelace says quietly, seriously. “Have you?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you hear?”

“Well, I didn’t really hear anything about him, per se. You know, hates-phones, lives-in-the-woods.”

“Yeah?”

“But he kind of. Showed up.”

Another break, this time even longer.

“I see.” She says. “Was there...did you have to…”

Another long pause.

“Captain?” Jacobi prompts.

“Did you have to... _plant_...a... _tree_...in the _ground_.”

“Did I—did I what?”

Lovelace breathes in deeply, and it comes through as phone static on this ancient, ancient brick Jacobi is holding to his ear.

“I’m asking,” she said, “if you had to—”

“Oh,” Jacobi says on an exhale. “Oh my god.” He laughs. “No, I didn’t—are you asking if I had to hide the body?”

There’s an excruciatingly long pause. “It’s not...an unreasonable question,” Lovelace says.

“I mean...yeah, no, I thought about it. He was living when I last saw him, though.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About a week.”

“How long was he there?”

“He was here for...a while, honestly. Months.”

Silence.

“That long?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t kill him.”

“Not that I can recall, no, but I'll be sure to let you know if I find a body bag or shallow grave shaped like a pain in the ass."

“And you didn’t _share_ that information with us?”

“Keeping secrets was the fastest way to get everyone killed _in space,_ Captain,” Jacobi says. “It’s fine back on Earth.”

“Jacobi.”

“I know.” He takes a deep breath. “I know, sorry. I was a little...there was a lot going on.”

“How was he?”

“Like? As a person? Or are you asking if he was dying?”

“Either. Both.”

“Well, he seemed as healthy as a horse physically, I guess. He did like, at least five hundred burpees every morning.”

“Wow,” Lovelace says.

“I know. It was awful.” He rubs his neck. “As a person, he was. Different.”

“Different? Different how?”

“Not in a good way, or like, a bad way." He kicks the stalk of the payphone, and it sends a shudder up the wire. "Well, I mean, yeah. He’s bad. He’s awful. I mean, I don’t think he was worse than he was before maybe, I think he was just...stuck.”

“I’m not following.”

Jacobi runs his fingers up and down the cord of the phone. “I think he was locked up in Goddard for a while.”

Lovelace hums after a moment. “I was wondering where he was. He doesn’t seem like somebody that’d fall off the grid like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He needs his spotlight.”

“I guess you’re right. He was talking about...about solitary in Goddard, with an AI that could only beep.”

“Hmm,” says Lovelace.

“Yeah, and I mean I totally get it, but then he went from isolation there to tracking me down, and isolation out here—because me and Dog are nothing if not completely fucking alone on this mountain.” He laughs and scrunches his eyebrows. “Which...is exactly the way I want it.”

“Sure,” Lovelace says after a minute. “Here, I’ll tell the others to keep an eye out.”

“Don’t," He says it plainly, like he's telling her not to check the weather. “I don’t care what happens to him.” He waits a second. “He could’ve died, you know. Hiking down the mountain. It’s pretty steep. He could just be at the bottom of some natural ditch. That’d be neat.”

There’s silence on the other end.

“I think you should come up and visit us this winter,” Lovelace says.

“Yeah? I’m not—”

“Bring Dog.”

“Captain...I’m not going to—

“Oh come on,” She says, snorting. “You can’t let me keep the title of Captain and then disobey an order, can you? Start calling me Lovelace, or come up and visit us for the winter.”

His heart gave a funny little twist. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t think that us all moving in together was a good idea,” Lovelace says. “I don’t think introducing Dom to our wild bullshit was a good idea. I don’t think that picking up the phone month after month when you call is a good idea. I don’t think that getting personally involved in the Goddard case was a good idea.”

“Ah,” Jacobi says.

“I don’t think there’s been any good ideas for a very, very long time,” Lovelace says. “Come up for the holidays. Bring Dog. Bring food.” There’s a crash on the other end, and then somebody swears in the background. Jacobi thinks that it’s probably Eiffel, but it could be Minkowski’s husband. He’s not familiar enough with his voice to know.

“Aye aye, Captain," he says, sensing that he's got to let her go and handle whatever fresh hell had been unleashed.

“There we go,” Lovelace says as somebody calls her name. “Talk to you later.”

* * *

 There’s a massive fire. It goes all day and night, and the crews are coming out to contain it. The air smells like it’s burning, even though it’s not too close, and Dog gets nervous. Jacobi keeps an eye on it.

“You’re awfully chatty lately,” Mike says over the radio after they cross their firefinders again and all the work is taken care of for the moment. “Did your pal head home?”

“Something like that,” Jacobi says with as much deliberate apathy as he can cram into three casual words. “Anything new with the raccoon?”

* * *

 Dog finds one of Kepler’s shirts crammed between Jacobi’s suitcase and the wall, and she drags it out, and over the course of a day she teethes it to shreds.

“Good girl," he tells her. She looks up at him from the floor, and with her ears down and her eyes skyward. The she gives him is the dictionary definition of pathetic.

“Less good,” he mutters, reaching down and giving a scrap of the shirt a tug. “Be a little angrier. Grrrr. Grrrrrrr. C’mon, who’s a good girl?”

She snaps her jaws onto the shirt, and pulls it back. It slips between his fingers and back into her possession.

“Don’t be weird,” Jacobi chastises, looking away from the smoke he’s been eyeing for the past few hours. “He’s an asshole anyway. Here, C’mere. Dog, hey, eyes—there we go. Come.” She stands and lumbers over, pressing her heavy head into Jacobi’s thigh, as if it's too heavy for her to hold up on her own. “Who’s a good girl?” He asks, curling his hand around the back of her head to scratch the soft, warm spot behind her ear. “Let’s go outside and run you through some tricks, alright?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE HEAR FROM THE HEPHAESTUS CREW......they're doing WELL but their house is in chaos almost always.


	5. O this woodcock, what an ass it is!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buckle Up Kiddos, This One Is A BEAST!!

Jacobi leans against the payphone outside of his apartment. He kicks some of the crumbling cement by the curb, and it spills out into the road. Dog walks around him.

“You should really consider getting a cellphone,” Minkowski says. “It’s a little difficult to get in contact with you considering we can’t really be sure how to reach you.”

“Carrier pigeon is always a good backup,” Jacobi says. Minkowski makes a noise caught between a groan and a sigh. “I will take handwritten letters though,” he says, “if you’re desperate.”

“Jacobi, we don’t know where you live.”

“Oh, ouch. That’s pathetic. No offense, Minkowski, but all of you worked for Goddard, right? If you can’t put a little effort in to track me down, you don’t need to see me.”

“That’s not—that is _not_ how this should work.”

“It’s incredibly simple,” Jacobi tells her slowly with patronizing, customer-service-enthusiasm encouragement. “I’m not even trying to hide. Not hard, anyway. Do I need to tell you the first step?”

“I’m not interested in—”

“Really, really simple. Look at the phone number.”

“Jacobi.”

“The area code is as good of place to start as any.”

“Jacobi.”

“Now, if you just—”

There’s the sound of shuffling on the other side of the line.

“Jacobi,” Lovelace says

“Oh, Captain, my Captain. Hey. I was just helping Minkowski. What can I do for you?”

“You can get a cellphone."

“No can do,” Jacobi says cheerfully. “I’ve had enough of being monitored, thanks.”

He hears a deep sigh.

“Still on for the holidays?” She asks.

“Is backing out an option?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s your answer then.”

There’s no response for a long time, it might be 20 seconds, or a minute, nothing but the static of Lovelace’s breath in the payphone.

“You don’t sound too good, Captain, want to do this some other time?

“That’d be great. Call me Wednesday night.”

“Aye aye.”

 

* * *

 

Somebody is pounding the door, and Dog is barking, and Jacobi only realizes it’s half past three in the fucking morning by the time he’s halfway to the door. “Fuck,” he says. “Hush, Dog—Dog, puppy, Sit. Good girl. Hush.” Reluctantly, she does as he asks, but turns her head to the door.

“God, George” Jacobi says, grabbing the doorknob. “Stop that, it’s three in the—oh.”

“Hello, Jacobi.”

Whatever motivation Dog had to remain sitting vanishes in an instant, and she throws herself at Kepler, tail wagging a mile in a minute. He's grinning and petting her wherever his hands can land, and she turns from him, launching herself at Jacobi excitedly, as if Jacobi’s responsible for him being here (as if Jacobi would’ve even told him where he lived), and then back to Kepler. “Hey, hey! Good girl,” Kepler says, “Have you missed me? Have you been good?”

Jacobi feels like he needs to remind Kepler that she is not his dog.

“She’s been really good.”

“Have you been keeping up with her tricks? Let’s see—spin, Dog, spin—”

Dog throws herself up at Kepler, trying to lick his face.

“Yes,” Jacobi says. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting,” Kepler says soberly, patting Dog’s flank, and gently leading her paws back to the floor. “It seems like somebody missed me.”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. “She has awful taste in men.”

Kepler smiles at him. “How was the rest of your watch?”

“Busy,” Jacobi says. “Lots of fires.”

“That’s good,” Kepler says. He moves forward, but then stops. “Can I come in?” The whole maneuver is stiff. A bit of a thrill runs through Jacobi when he realizes he could say no, he could tell Kepler to fuck off again and, if past performance is any indicator of future results, he might vanish for another chunk of months.

“You get bit by a vampire or something, Kepler?” Jacobi asks.

“Just being...polite.”

“You're doing a piss poor job,” Jacobi says, stepping back into his apartment. Dog darts by him and into the room, and then trots back to Kepler, finally calm enough to sniff his hand (her front, at least, her hindquarters are still waving with the force of her tail), and then start to lick it. “But sure. Did you know I lived here the whole time, or did you just figure out out recently?”

Kepler pets Dog, who grins up at him, tongue lolling, unknowing.

“Cool,” Jacobi says. “The whole time.”

“Are you...surprised?”

“Sometimes, I wish I was, Warren. Sometimes, I wish I was.” He’s testing the name on his tongue, and he can see the second the sound hits the air—there’s a minute flex or clench of a muscle in Kepler’s jaw. He thinks he can see something change in the bulldog set of his shoulders, but he’s not sure.

“Are. We. Doing. That,” Kepler says, low.

“No,” Jacobi says. “I was trying it out.”

“And was it...to your liking?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Daniel is still off limits too,” Jacobi says, just making sure. “Calling you Warren was supposed to be a power move.”

“Yes, I got that.”

“But, honestly? I’m not real into that game. I tried it out. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never take another order from you again, but—”

“Yes,” Kepler asserts, “I get it. Who is George?”

“Who?”

“At the door, you called me George. Is there somebody who usually knock on your door this early?”

“Oh,” Says Jacobi. “Are you upset that you’re not special? That there are other people just as inconsiderate to my sleep schedule as you?” He laughs, “It’s a long line, Kepler. It’s a long fucking line.”

“If I recall correctly, when not working, you consider two pm to be...a regular morning.”

“Hey,” says Jacobi. “Not all of us get up at the asscrack of dawn to throw ourselves at the floor like, five-hundred times.” Kepler snorts, and sits down on Jacobi’s couch, and Dog trots back to Jacobi for a final ear scratch before she hauls herself up next to Kepler and receives her due. “George is the guy who lives a floor up from me,” Jacobi says.

“Is he where you got Dog?”

“Nah, that was Shelley.”

Kepler rolls Dog over, and she wiggles enthusiastically as he rubs her stomach. “What do you do for work?” Kepler asks.

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

Jacobi makes a tutting noise. “C’mon, don’t be shy. I know you do your research.”

“I don’t...know.” Kepler says it slowly, he sounds almost constipated.

“You’re serious?”

“I don’t have...the resources...I used to, and you’ve been hard to keep track of.”

“Intentionally, I assure you.”

Neither of them make a noise louder than a huff of breath, but there’s a shared humor there, and it’s not the first time that Jacobi feels a little empty.

“So,” Kepler prompts, “what have you been doing?”

“Normally I get a job as a barista or something during the winter,” Jacobi says steadily, looking at Kepler. “But I got a different offer in October.”

“Oh?”

“It turns out there’s a man who’s gone missing. Used to be part of the famous tech conglomerate, Goddard Futuristics. I used to work for him—they want me to bring him in, so I’ve just been waiting for him to show his face again.” Jacobi smiles, real slow. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Kepler?”

Kepler’s dead still and his face is expressionless and taut. Jacobi can hear his heartbeat in his ears it’s so silent.

“Hah.” Jacobi says slowly. “Hah.”

“Don’t.” Relief drips from his shoulders, but Kepler’s face draws into that tight, angry scowl.

“Don’t what? Do you think I could?”

“You’ve...surprised me before.”

Jacobi smiles wickedly.

“What about you? What’ve you been up to? I thought you might’ve fallen off a cliff while trying to get back to civilization.”

“You should be so lucky,” Kepler says. Dog starts pawing his arm, and he resumes petting her.

“She’s spoiled,” Jacobi says. “She’s a good, spoiled-rotten dog.”

“A... _Dog?_ ”

“A dog.”

“Please,” Kepler says, “she has to have some other name.”

“I’ve made this bed,” Jacobi says, “And now you and me are going to lie in it, as well as Dog because she likes to sleep up high, and everyone else who asks for her name too. It’s actually going to be pretty fucking crowded and uncomfortable, so you might want to get ready.”

Kepler sighs.

“Tell me what you were doing for the past few months,” Jacobi orders.

“Same as you, putting out...fires.”

Jacobi decides not to remind Kepler that he doesn’t actually put out the fires, that he just watches them. “What kinds of fires?”

“Old fires,” Kepler says. “Ones I couldn’t get to before.”

“How bad?”

Kepler takes a long pause. It’s a minute of dead air between them at least. “I don’t know,” he says. “Some stuff got burned—”

“Can you just—”

“Jacobi?”

“Can we just. Okay, can we talk without the metaphors? Like, it’s three am, I don’t like you, I don’t really want to play games. Can you just...can we talk like normal people?”

Kepler takes another minute to collect himself, or, at least, that’s what Jacobi assumes he’s doing. “I was looking for my resources,” Kepler says slowly. He looks around. He points at Jacobi, and then, subtly, curls his three middle fingers into his fist, and sticks the pinky and thumb out like antennae. He wiggles that hand.

“No,” Jacobi says, shaking his head. “I don’t have a phone. Definitely not a Goddard one...but yeah, no phone.”

Kepler purses his lips. “Clever,” he says.

“Done,” Jacobi corrects. “So fucking done, thanks. Tell me about your fires.”

 

* * *

 

“You know, Facebook is tracking you.”

Jacobi is back at the payphone again, and Kepler is holding Dog’s leash as she wanders over the sidewalk and sniffs it for...other dogs? Maybe? Food?

“You know what else Facebook is for?” Eiffel says, and there’s a tension in his voice that’s been getting tighter and tighter throughout the conversation.

“Genuinely,” says Jacobi, “I have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’s just there to keep tabs and take information on you.”

“It’s for _keeping in contact_ ,” Eiffel says, “something which, if I remember correctly, you’ve been having difficulty with!”

Jacobi lets the silence hang for a minute.

“I called on monday. That was three days ago.”

Eiffel groans.

“I’m just saying, I’ve been doing a pretty good job of staying in contact.”

“You’re just—you know what, Jacobi? You’re not worth it. I’m just. I’m just going to put the phone down.”

“You’re what?”

“Dowwwwwnnn it goes. Putting it down. Nice chat. _Not_ looking forward to seeing you.” There’s a solid thunk as the plastic of the phone hits the table, followed by a few heavy steps and Eiffel swearing, and then it goes quiet. Jacobi raises his eyebrows, and Kepler must take this as his cue to approach.

“Done?”

“On hold,” Jacobi says.

“On a...pay phone?”

“Don’t you worry your blocky little head about me,” Jacobi says. Kepler pulls a face. “I have enough quarters to deal with it. This is usually the protocol anyway.”

“And who would keep you waiting like that?”

Jacobi gives Kepler a long, hard look.

“Hephaestus,” Kepler admits.

“Thank you,” Jacobi says. “Please, for the love of—I don’t know, whatever you genuinely care about—stop pulling this shit. If you could just be straight with me for once in your fucking life—”

“If I could just…be...straight...with...you?”

Jacobi can feel his nostrils flare. “Fuck,” he says. “You’re not funny.” Kepler’s got a little, lopsided grin on his face. There’s a click of plastic against wood on the other end of the line, and Jacobi holds up a hand.

“Hello?” Lovelace says.

“Captain,” Jacobi breathes, “My Captain.” He shows Kepler his back and braces his arm against the roof of the phone’s stand. “Feeling better?”

“Not really,” she says, and he can hear the ill strain of her voice. “Sitrep?”

“We can postpone this another few days if you need it.”

“It’s a conversation, Jacobi. I’ll be fine. I’ve been doing nothing but resting for the past twenty hours.”

“One, you’re underestimating my ability to make a conversation difficult and two—”

“Well,” Lovelace says with stuffy cheer, “you get too difficult and I hang up. Simple as that.”

“That’s fair.” Jacobi says, resigning himself to not telling her what two was.

“Sitrep,” Lovelace repeats.

“I’m fine. The neighbors are fine.” Jacobi pauses. “Dog is—well, she’s excited. Kepler’s back.”

“Oh.” Lovelace says. “Is he?”

Jacobi doesn’t need to turn around to know that Kepler’s interest in the conversation, which has been piqued since the beginning, has peaked. “Yeah, totally. He’s standing right behind me, actually. Probably wants to hang around to make sure I’m not going to shittalk him or something. Wanna say hi, Kepler?” Jacobi turns and extends the phone for a minute, and Kepler delicately leans in. “Hello, Captain.”

Jacobi pulls the phone back. “Very polite,” he says.

“Inspirational,” Lovelace agrees. “Don’t get him started calling me Captain.”

“Is that just reserved for me?”

“No, you just won’t quit. I don’t want Kepler getting any ideas.”

Jacobi turns from the phone, barely glancing at Kepler. “She says not to call her Captain.”

“Alright. Is—”

“ _Lovelace_ will be enough,” Jacobi says, turning his back again.

“That wasn’t...what I was going to say...but—”

“I was thinking I’d head up at the end of the week. You said something about food?” Jacobi asks, turning his back on Kepler again. This is the kind of shit that’d get him slaughtered back when Kepler was his commander, this intentional exclusion, dismissal of Kepler's importance.

“Thanks,” Lovelace says, and it sounds _almost_ warm. “Yeah, I mean, we don’t need anything if you can’t bring it, but if you want to bring some food, that would be...nice. Pretty sure that’s part of these get-together things.”

“How do you feel about chips?”

“Not salt and vinegar.”

In the background of Lovelace’s end, Jacobi can hear the muffled, indignant exclamation from Eiffel.

“Stop _snooping_ , Eiffel—they’re just not good! No, barbecue is _fine_. No. Listen, the sooner I get this over with, the sooner—”

There’s a long pause. Jacobi kicks the curb.

“Okay,” Lovelace says. “I’m back.”

“It’s funny how this always happens. If Eiffel or Minkowski really want to talk to me that much, they could just pick up the phone themselves.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“I’m hilarious and coming up to visit for the holidays.”

Jacobi can hear her sigh, and then it slowly breaks into peals of soft laughter.

“God,” Lovelace says. “You’re right. This is a bad idea.” Jacobi smiles. “Put Kepler on.”

Jacobi puts another two quarters into the machine, and passes the phone and a fistfull of coins into Kepler’s hand. “Have fun,” he says, taking Dog’s leash from his hands.

And then he walks away.

 

* * *

  

They don’t talk about Kepler coming along, but Jacobi doesn’t tell him he can’t. One morning he wakes up and there’s a car parked outside, and Kepler is leaning against it.

“Did you have that the whole time?” Is Jacobi’s first question. Kepler doesn’t answer so much as he just...smiles. His eyes crinkle a little around the edges, and he taps his fingers against the roof like he’s playing piano. “Okay,” Jacobi says, “so you went out and bought this yesterday.”

Kepler’s smile loses a smidge of that brightness.

“Kepler,” Jacobi says. _You’re not going to impress me._ “Does it work? Or did you buy a lemon?”

“I’m...affronted by the suggestion that I’d waste money on a car that doesn’t—”

“You didn’t know the Yugo was a piece of shit,” Jacobi says.

“That,” Kepler says slowly. “Was...one...car.”

“And then,” Jacobi says pointedly, “when it broke down and Maxwell found, by some cursed luck, a _Trabant_ in the nearby barn—”

“So maybe—”

“You said ‘This...looks...like...a _...good..._ car’—”

“So maybe,” Kepler repeats insistently, “I don’t know—”

“It was a Trabant! They look like shit! They’re made of hard, painted cardboard!”

Kepler stares at him for a long time.

“It’s a functioning car, Jacobi.”

He sighs. “Okay, that’s fine. Thank you. Let’s just...pack it up, I guess. Are you going to want to drive?”

Kepler weighs the keys in his hand. “I mean, unless you—”

“I don’t really care. Just let me drive when you start getting tired, alright?”

“Okay. That’s—alright. Good.”

 

* * *

 

Dog takes up the whole backseat. It’s hers now. She loves it, but she keeps on sticking her head over the shoulder of Jacobi’s seat so that he can rest her heavy jaws on him and get scratched behind the ear.

 

* * *

 

The car rumbles quietly down the highway, and Jacobi hates how much it feels like home—Kepler on his left, the window on his right, the dull roar of travel. The silence—not quite companionable, but not awkward in any sense of the word. Comfortable. Home.

 

* * *

 

Maxwell.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Jacobi says. “Let’s talk.”

“Sure,” Kepler says lightly, although Jacobi can hear a note of suspicion in his voice. It's not unwarranted. He’s been getting progressively more irritated for the past hour, and actually climbed into the back with Dog to see if it would help (it did, but not enough).

“How was Chicago?” Jacobi asks.

“What?”

“Y’know, since you grew up there. How was it. Where’d you live? How’d you live? I know you had dogs, but I never hear about— _fuck!”_

The car swerves sharply onto the shoulder of the road and Kepler pulls to such an abrupt start that Dog falls and wakes up with a sharp bark, whale-eyed and scrambling. The belt up front clicks undone.

“Kepler,” Jacobi yells, “what the fuck was that for? Are you trying to—”

Kepler twists from where he was siting and leans into the backseat, arms braced against the front seats. “Do not,” He says. His face is twisted into a snarl unlike any Jacobi’s seen before, but a close cousin of the blunt force trauma face. “Jacobi, I am. Trying. My best. Do not treat me like a game. I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Okay.”

Kepler doesn’t look away.

“Okay,” Jacobi repeats. “I won’t. Fine. Sorry.”

Kepler slowly maneuvers himself back into his seat, and takes a long, deep breath. Jacobi watches him closely, and sees his arms shaking as he reaches to grab the wheel.

“Hold on,” Jacobi says. “Let’s take a break for a second here, I’m gonna take Dog out.” The sharp turn spooked the shit out of her, and she’s not used to car rides this long besides. “Are you good to wait here?”

Kepler is silent for another minute, and then he sighs and grabs the car door. “No, I should stretch my legs.”

 

* * *

 

The motel might not be pet friendly, but they sneak Dog in anyway, and Kepler gives her a treat and runs her through her quiet tricks.

There are two beds, and they close the blinds, and Jacobi orders a pizza.

Kepler keeps Dog distracted while Jacobi goes out to get the pizza, just in case Dog might start barking. The pizza is anchovies and onions, because both of them are terrible people. He almost orders pineapple too, but Maxwell isn’t here, and neither of them really like pineapple that much.

They’re sitting across from each other on the beds, and the pizza box is resting next to Kepler, the plates on the nightstand, and Dog is sniffing over Jacobi’s arm, trying to nibble at his slice.

“Shoo. You already ate. Leave it, Dog.” She gives him a look, and then dejectedly rests her head on her paws. “Good girl,” Jacobi says, and he rips off a piece and gives it to her, and she excitedly licks it from his fingers.

Kepler laughs gently, sucking a bit of sauce from his fingertip “You shouldn’t give her food that you’re telling her not to eat.”

“Are you trying to tell me what to do with my dog?” Jacobi asks tiredly.

Kepler smiles, and it’s a tight, tired expression. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good.” Jacobi swings his legs up onto the bed, and putting his plate on the nightstand again. Kepler picks it up, stacks it on his, and puts them both in the pizza box. It’d started to rain a few minutes into their dinner, bringing the already winter-dark sky to a pitch black. By now it’s pouring, and they both lie there, quiet and mostly content, listening to the rain buffeting the flat roof in alternating sheets.

Dog climbs up and lays her head down on his chest, and Jacobi starts scratching her head, and she smiles her smile, and tries to lick his hand as he pets her, succeeding, and then gently grabbing it in her jaws and softly chewing.

“Did you ever...do...therapy?”

Jacobi turns, and gives Kepler a long, raised-eyebrows look, which is returned with a small shrug.

“Once,” Jacobi says after a moment’s hesitation. “Three meetings. I had to if I wanted a diagnosis so I could get on testosterone and top surgery and everything. I didn’t really know where to start, so I just, went to the most-likely therapist I could find on short notice. I just moved out, options were limited.”

“But you didn’t...go to therapy...for anything...else?”

Jacobi shrugs nervously, and laughs a solitary note. “You mean for the shit you or Goddard put me through? Nope. It wasn’t...it wasn’t convenient. At the time.”

Kepler nods. “I did,” he said.

“For that?”

“No,” Kepler says smoothly. “It was before space.”

“Oh. How’d it go?”

Kepler snorts. “Only went to two sessions. She wouldn’t stop staring at me. Acting like I was an open book, like she just knew everything about how I worked.” Kepler laughs like the count on sesame street again, leaning back.

Jacobi nods slowly.

“It made me worse.” Kepler says. “You know I’m not what you’d call...a morally upstanding citizen,” Kepler says. It’s Jacobi’s turn to snort. “But I was even worse, as a kid. I was out of control. Thinking about it makes me go right back there. Makes me worse.”

“I think that’s...I think that’s probably supposed to be like, the first step or something. Like, if all therapy did was make people worse they wouldn’t go to it. You’ve got to feel better at some point, right?”

“Well,” Kepler says, “the way I see it, I can’t really afford to get worse.”

“Mmm.” Says Jacobi.

“So I’d rather,” Kepler says with explicit slowness, the way he used to speak when Jacobi was being obstinate, or when Maxwell wasn’t understanding what he asked, “that you didn’t go digging. Is...that...doable?”

“Sure,” Jacobi says, “I guess so.”

 

* * *

 

When Jacobi folds himself into the already-warm passenger seat, Kepler is sitting there, doing the crosswords on the newspaper.

“Ready to hit the road, bro?” Jacobi says, and the second he finishes the last word he already regrets it. Kepler physically winces, and Jacobi grimaces.

“Jacobi,” Kepler breathes. He sounds like he's in pain. Jacobi squeezes his eyes shut.

“I know.”

“I’m not your ‘bro.’”

“Fuck, I know.” Jacobi says. “It’s weird calling you Kepler to your face. I don’t...I’m just looking for something that doesn’t feel like a brick in my mouth.”

“Well,” Kepler mutters, firing up the car and tucking the newspaper away for later. “Process of elimination. Happy to report the results indicate that you shouldn’t call me that again.”

“Alright,” Jacobi says. “Good talk.”

 

* * *

 

“What did you know about me?” Jacobi asks while they’re driving. He’s back in the passenger seat again, and Dog is in the back sleeping, and he’s chewing through a bag of chips specifically for the trip. They’re sour-cream and onion, and the whole car smells like it.

“Everything I needed to,” Kepler says.

“About my background, I mean.”

“You already lived away from home,” Kepler says. “So when we were screening you, that didn’t help. We did some investigation to your home, but there wasn’t a whole lot. Your family was relatively private, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. “Private is a word for it.”

“Your father,” Kepler says slowly. The word is loaded with a request for permission.

“Yep.” Jacobi says the word curtly, the click of a key leaving a lock.

Kepler redirects smoothly. “We didn’t have a lot of information on your mother.”

“She was fine with me,” Jacobi says. “Like, we got in arguments too, but it wasn’t like with my dad. She was fine until—until this.” He gestures at himself. “Thought it was Dad’s fault.”

“Ah,” Kepler says. “That, we knew, that she disowned you, I mean.”

There’s another break in the conversation, and they pass a billboard that says “Beer.” Just that. Beer. The words are white, and massive on top of a scene of cactuses and mountains. Jacobi closes his eyes. Ohio is so fucking weird.

“I’m not cool with that,” Jacobi says at last. “Like, I know you can’t delete your memories of it or whatever, but I want you to know that it’s complete piss that you can just read a file on me and know all that shit.”

“I know,” Kepler says quietly.

“But yeah, I got through college. I got a job, and then I told her—I was already like a couple months on T and she would’ve found out eventually, and then she was like. Well, it was a long distance conversation, and she was like...that’s it. And I didn’t…” He breathes in. “I didn’t bother, y’know? Like.” He spins his hands outward, and then starts fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. “Who would? Right? The both of them could go fuck themselves. I was living independently anyway.”

“And she thought...you were trying to be your father?”

Jacobi laughs, giving Kepler a look. “I don’t know what she thought. Maybe, yeah. I wasn’t. Maybe she thought I was. You know, the first time you called me Mister Jacobi I almost had a conniption, right? I was like...‘Mr. Jacobi—’ y’know?”

“My mother thought the same thing,” Kepler says.

Jacobi turns just a bit, so that his ear is closer to Kepler. “She what? Really?”

“I was the spitting image of him,” Kepler says evenly. “Same eyes, same face. I grew up tall and broad like him, his hands. My voice, the way I spoke—all like him, except my register was...just...slightly...higher for a long time.”

“Huh,” Jacobi says, thinking of that night on the mountain. _A little bigger. A little more intimidating._

“She said…” Kepler’s looking past the road. “She said that she was useless, that I was just some parasite he put in her, and I sucked her dry—took everything out of her. That there was nothing of her in me. Just him. Like a cuckoo bird.”

They’re on one of those flat, midwest roads. The kind that go on forever in one direction, endless  and empty this early in the morning. Jacobi’s not worried, he’s seen Kepler drive in worse conditions, but he keeps an eye on Kepler’s hands, just in case. His wrists.

“Fucked up,” Jacobi says, feeling like a real master of sympathy.

“She was high on morphine,” Kepler says. “Or maybe going through withdrawal. I can’t remember.”

“How old were you?”

Kepler draws in a long breath through his nose and out his mouth, and his fingers _roll_ around the wheel. “Probably around fifteen, sixteen. Maybe earlier. I was just starting to look like I might eventually grow into a man, and I think that set her off.”

Jacobi nods slightly. “I want to stop soon,” he says. “Let Dog run around a bit, maybe you could run her through her tricks. She’s probably getting bored.”

“No problem,” Kepler breathes. “Five minutes sound good?”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. “Sounds perfect.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they're trying! they're trying to refine their communication, and boundaries about and what's okay, and what's not.


	6. and that my deeds shall prove.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one takes a trip into gentler and more tangential territory

“There are three rooms left,” says the woman running the counter at a motel that is specifically pet friendly. They checked this time. The woman at the counter asked to see Dog, and smiled politely but judgementaly when she learned Dog’s name.

“Fantastic,” Jacobi says.

“They’re all singles,” she adds.

“Ah,” says Kepler.

“That’s fine,” says Jacobi. He’s about to follow it up with  _ “He doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor,” _ but Kepler takes the air before he can.

“What’s a little sharing, it’s nothing new right,  _ Mister Jacobi?” _

For fuck’ sake.

“Sure.”

“So...no cot?” Asks the woman at the counter.

“We’ll be fine,” Kepler says  _ warmly. _

The bed is narrow, and Kepler climbs in first, and then pats the sheets until Dog leaps up on the bed. Jacobi takes his shirt off, and puts on a loose pair of sweats, and throws up the blankets. Dog is on him in seconds licking his face (her favorite place to lick) and he pulls his glasses off, far from her reach and playfully pushes her head away.

“I remember...when you wouldn’t take off your shirt in front of me,” Kepler says, and when Jacobi replays the soundbite over and over in his head immediately after, it almost sounds affectionate.

“Watch the sap, Kepler. It’s not because I’m comfortable with you,” Jacobi says, turning his head to look at Kepler whose crooked, twice-broken nose is less than a foot and a half from his own. “It’s because you don’t really register, and I don’t give as much of a shit about that as I did when I was a newbie.”

“That’s a kind of comfort,” Kepler says. “Desensitization.” 

“I don’t know if that’s comforting,” Jacobi says. “I think that’s more just like, getting used to it. Normalcy.”

“What is normal,” Kepler says slowly, “can be comforting  _ because  _ it has become normal.”

“I guess,” Jacobi says. These are the kinds of conversations that Kepler would have with Maxwell. He’d toss her something, a quote, a philosophical argument, a bone for her to chew on until she reduced it to splinters and handed him the pieces. She was clever enough that this was a game for her, that she could have fun with it. Jacobi took one philosophy class in college, and he hated it. Kepler’s queries amuse him at best, but that Kepler is reaching to him for this is—unsettling, and it opens the wound of Maxwell’s loss again, quietly. The silent, efficient slice of a knife. “I’m turning off the light.” 

“Goodnight,” Kepler sighs.

The light clicks off, and Jacobi lies back on the pillows. He’s surprised to find that the thought of her doesn’t overwhelm him with the deadness, and the loss that it did just months ago, and his heart seizes with the thought.

_ All I have left of her is the pain of her loss, _ he thinks, lost in his panic,  _ what if I lose that? What if I lose everything I have left of her— _

But, no. That’s not true. He has more of her than that left. And, maybe, if he keeps talking about her, if he keeps thinking about her, he can get to the rest of her.

Beneath the covers, Jacobi curls his hand into a loose, shell, and he tries to remember how her hand felt in his, smooth, with long, typing fingers, almost always cold.

He falls asleep on shaking breaths.

 

* * *

 

At some point while during the night Dog scoots to the end of the bed. She loves sleeping next to Jacobi, but perhaps sharing the small space between two grown men is too much for her, and sadly she must enjoy Kepler too much to shoo him away.

When Jacobi wakes up the first time, it’s from a slow, dreamless sleep, and he’s caught under the weight of Kepler—the man is a heater on a good day, and now he’s curled around Jacobi’s body like a shell, arms braced almost defensively around Jacobi’s own. His breaths are easy and deep, and Jacobi can feel each part of it, from the expanding of Kepler’s ribcage against his back, to the exhale sliding down past and over his throat.

“Kepler,” Jacobi breathes

Behind him, there’s another long, slow drag of air.

Slowly, carefully, he taps Kepler’s elbow twice, the only spot he can reach, or else he’d touch Kepler’s shoulder. “Kepler,” he says again.

It’s a long moment before there’s a heavy, conscious sigh that moves so quickly in contrast to the breaths before it that the passing of it almost chills him. “Yes,” Kepler says, just barely distanced from his ear. “I’m awake.”

“You’re boiling me alive.”

Another tired breath. Kepler withdraws his arms, and turns the axis of his hips, thrusting one arm under his pillow. “I keep on forgetting you’re not actually cold-blooded,” Kepler jokes. Jacobi swats sleepily at Kepler with his open palm, and it glances off of his shoulder.

Something presses down on Jacobi’s ankle, and suddenly Dog is up there, on his chest again, and she settles down, flopping the rest of herself onto Kepler’s midsection.

He can’t see it in the pitch dark of the room, but he can hear the whisper of covers, and the two soft, hollow thumps of Kepler patting her side.

 

* * *

 

Dog rests delicately on her haunches, looking up at Kepler, who he knows would prefer if she went into a full, weighty sit rather than perching like this. Jacobi’s never really sure if he doesn’t make her go into a more solid sit because he knows Jacobi is waiting with his steel-toed construction boots, or if he’s just given up caring about the little battles this early in the morning.

“Good,” Kepler says, more because it’s the finality of the task rather than praise. “Spin.”

She spins. He says it again, but directs his finger in the opposite direction. She sits. “Spin,” Kepler says. “That way. Spin that way.”

“I used to like pink,” Jacobi says, pulling on his socks. Kepler takes a few seconds before he turns, and he gives Jacobi a slow Kepler-Confused (which would look like annoyance on anyone else's face) look over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Jacobi says. “When I was little. I loved it, it was pretty good. Sunsets, pink lemonade, salmon, fireworks—”

Kepler throws him a small smile.

“It’s a solid color,” Jacobi says. “When my mom painted my nails, say we had to go to some kind of special event or something, it was always pink.”

“But you don’t like it anymore,” Kepler says, almost a question.

“No. I don’t. I haven’t liked it since I was eleven. There are things you have to give up,” Jacobi says, “if you want to get what you need, and I...got what I needed.”

This is the simple part, and Kepler nods—he’s turned to Jacobi as the conversation continued, and now his shoulders are perpendicular to Jacobi’s own. Dog licks at his hand.

“Now,” Jacobi says, “I’m forty-two. I’ve been on T for almost twenty years. People don’t look at me twice.”

Kepler nods again, slower. There’s something satisfying about this, like a game, a conversation wherein finally it’s not just his Colonel’s soliloquy.

“I still can’t touch pink,” Jacobi says. He puts on his other sock, and stuffs his feet into his boots. “I can’t. It’s revolting just thinking about wearing a pink hat, let alone anything louder.”

He throws on his shirt. Kepler's eyes are as sharp as a hawk's, and that’s fine because Jacobi was expecting it. When he’s done, he stares at Kepler who looks back silently.

“Are you ready?” Jacobi asks, and it’s like a spell is broken. Kepler blinks, straightens his back, and pets Dog as she trots over to Jacobi, knowing she’s about to get her walk.

“Of course,” Kepler says.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Jacobi is standing at the counter of the rest-stop with a bag of chips and saltless, spiceless jerky in his hand. Under his other arm, he has a long row of plastic-wrapped juiceboxes, because he’s sick of Kepler looking him in the eye with a can of diet coke in his hand and saying  _ “Thanks for the pop,” _ because maybe he thinks that Jacobi should be saying pop instead of soda or something.

Sure, he is from Wisconsin, but he’s from Milwaukee and his family called it soda. So it’s soda.

Kepler’s wandering around aimlessly, last time Jacobi gave a shit. He’s probably just stretching his legs. He walked into what looked like a miniature beauty shop, misty-eyed magnified photos of women with flowing hair and all.

_ Pop. _

Ugh.

 

* * *

 

Jacobi’s head is hanging out the window. The air is freezing, but nice, and crisp, and he feels more awake.

“Unfortunately,” Kepler says, “The kitten fell into a sewer populated with vicious and bloodthirsty rats.”

Jacobi leans back into the car, and closes the window slowly. “Fortunately, as the kitten had those freak-science-thumbs, he was able to create a magnificent contraption which, with the help of his devilishly handsome good looks, was able to convince the rats that he was the prophet of their new messiah.”

“Unfortunately,” Kepler says, “this was an almost puritan society of well organized rats, and eventually his devilishly handsome good looks became viewed as devilish looks, and the rats which loved him, turned on him, and called him a promiscuous feline temptation towards termination.”

“Fortunately,” Jacobi says, raising his eyebrows at Kepler, “the cat had a small band of rats which would support him until death, and they helped him escape.”

“Unfortunately, they died in the attempt.”

“Fortunately, the cat made it out of the sewers alive.”

“Unfortunately, he exited onto the flourishing backyard of a mansion which was being mowed.”

“He what?”

“You...heard...me, Jacobi.”

“Sewers don’t exit into backyards.”

“Cats don’t have thumbs, either.” 

“Yeah, but that’s like—god. How come you get to be the ‘Unfortunately’ person? You’re shit at it.”

Kepler scoffs. “I...am...not... _ shit _ at it,” he says.  _ “You  _ just go for the jugular. We have different ways of playing.”

“I play to win, Kepler.”

“This isn’t a  _ winning  _ game.” Kepler says, as Jacobi takes a deep breath of his stale hypocrisy. “It’s co-operative. You. Tell. A. Story.”

“It’s a game, and I’m play for keeps.”

 

The car lapses into silence.

“Twenty questions?” Kepler suggests innocently.

Jacobi drags his hands down his face. “Just—turn on the radio, would you?”

 

* * *

 

Being shirtless is nice, really. Sometimes. His scars have faded to pale, pinkish and disconnected lines which bite in at his flesh just around the corners of his ribcage. Habitually, he doesn’t usually remove his shirt in front of people, but Kepler is almost a non-presence now, and so when he walks in while Jacobi is toweling off his hair and sitting on the bed, he barely even registers him.

“I’m thinking takeout tonight,” Jacobi says. Beneath the towel, he can see Kepler’s pointed shoes advancing towards him although the man himself is quiet. They’re black leather, and worn so thoroughly through that the toes of the shoes are rippled with creases. Tawny,raw spots of damage and high-friction areas look almost like wounds. They’re not a pair that Jacobi saw before this month. It’s likely that they were recently acquired.

“That sounds fine by me,” Kepler says and then, from beneath the towel, Jacobi sees Kepler’s arm cross his field of vision, and hears the clunk of something small, glass, and heavy against the cheap nightstand. He takes off the towel to get a better look.

His stomach twists.

“Alright,” Jacobi says. He doesn’t look at Kepler, but Jacobi can see from the corner of his eye that Kepler’s arms come up to cross each other. “Clearly, there was a misunderstanding here.” Looking entirely inconsequential against the fake wood, and at the same time almost brutally obtrusive, is a small, round, sloped bottle of black nail polish. It’s not exactly the dirt-cheap shit either. Kepler had to have picked it up at the rest stop.

“I think so,” Kepler agrees, and even though Jacobi keeps his head turned to the side, denying him, he can feel Kepler trying to catch his eyes.

“If you’re trying to fix—”

“I’m not,” Kepler says hastily. “This…” he reaches out and touches the bottle with a finger, rolling it on an axis against the table, “...is for me.”

Jacobi gives him a short, hard look.

“I’d like you to paint my nails,” Kepler clarifies. “If I remember correctly, you painted Maxwell’s before?”

He did. He painted her nails once, they had to look good for an assignment and he’d already helped her with her makeup, and so they decided to do the nails too, just to go the whole way.

“I painted them gold.” He reaches out, plucking the bottle from under Kepler’s hand, and wraps his fingers around it like a grenade.

“I want you to do mine,” Kepler says.

“Black?”

“Yes.”

“God, Kepler. That’s...that’s really goth.”

Jacobi snorts, feeling the tension ease out of his shoulders. Kepler gives him a diplomatic look, and pulls the gloves off of. “Are you going to do it, or not?” 

“Yeah, yeah, no, I’m down. Here, give me your hand,” He says, and Kepler puts his flesh-and-blood hand into Jacobi’s. He rolls the knuckles away from Kepler for a moment, so that Kepler’s hand is loosely gripping Jacobi’s own but then slides his fingers down the wrist and turns his grasp into a loose podium.

Jacobi cracks the seal of the bottle before getting beat around the head with the chemical smell—ethyl acetate? He caps the bottle.

“Outside?” Kepler asks.

“If you don’t mind freezing a bit, yeah.”

He doesn’t. The sky outside is dark blue with the threat of night, and it’s chilly, and Dog whines at the door for a moment before Jacobi hears her reluctantly lie down against it. He wrinkles his nose when he opens the bottle, but it’s not honestly that bad. It’s just strong at first, and loaded with every time Jacobi has ever painted a fingernail.

Kepler splays his hand on Jacobi’s knee. He has square hands, wide across the center and crooked-looking fingers that seem almost short, or maybe his palm is just a bit long. Jacobi takes the pointer first, and gives it a short, smooth stroke with the nail polish brush, and then another. Kepler watches quietly, and Jacobi tucks his shoulders in a bit to stave off the cold. 

“I went to law school,” Kepler says slowly.

“The idea that you’d enjoy standing before a room of people and arguing them into picking a choice is absolutely unsurprising to me.”

There’s a pause. “Do you want the story?”

“Maybe later,” Jacobi says, just because he can. “Why did you go to law school?” He lifts Kepler’s hand from his knee, and blows on the nail. When he looks up, Kepler’s eyes linger on him.

“Well, as you said, I was great at arguing. I was great at being in front of people, and I could memorize the rules,” he says. “It made sense.”

“How was it?”

“At the time...it was exhilarating.”

Jacobi blows on another nail, and Kepler’s fingers curl in his grip. “Cold?” Jacobi asks.

“I’m alright.” He breathes his words out like a sigh.

They get through another finger in silence.

“Did you bring Lady with you?” Jacobi absently presses his thumb into the pit of Kepler’s palm.

“I had to,” Kepler says, but there’s that small, strange note of fondness in his voice, the one that draws Jacobi in as much as it puts him off. “It was fine—I managed to find a roommate and a place that didn’t mind. She probably would’ve liked more walks, but she was good, she put up with it.”

Jacobi hums. “Puck?”

“Couldn’t manage to get him out in time—and my father didn’t hate him anyway. They could get along.”

“That’s good for the first coat.” Jacobi says,  “Do you want me to do your cyberhand too?”

Kepler hesitates, it’s barely a second but Jacobi catches it, just before Kepler flexes the fingers, and the glittering joints beneath the hard shell of the fingers are exposed for a moment. “Sure.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t happen every time, but he’s gotten so used to the nightmares, sometimes he can tell when they’re coming. Just as he’s about to fall asleep—it’s something like a twist in his stomach, or a sinking feeling. It’s like walking into a dimly lit room with a flashlight, turning, and the light catching a pair of reflective eyes, and spitting the light back hot and red and yellow.

It’s like the second before the animal moves.

Jacobi gets this feeling as he starts to slip backwards into a dream, and so he knows what is coming. He knows what’s going to happen, but there’s nothing that he can do.

 

* * *

 

Hands on his shoulders—hauling him, heaving him, all of the feeling and control comes back in a handful of seconds and his knees jerk to life—and the scar in his neck, where the restraining bolt had been inserted, the makeshift USB drive in the meat of his throat aches powerfully, unreasonably, a screwdriver against his bones.

The last thing that comes back is his lungs, or his awareness of them. A light flickers on, and he kills the final, groaning, terrified cry that leaves his lungs as soon as he hears the first note, and it coils in his gut, turning into a wet, wracking, sobbing breath.

“Breathe,” Kepler reminds him, hands still on his shoulders.

He tries.

It takes a couple minutes, but he gets there, and the shocks of panic begin to leave, and he covers his mouth with the back of his hand, and screws his eyes shut. Kepler’s warm fingers squeeze his shoulder for a moment, and then they leave, landing in his hair, and combing through it with his blocky fingers. “Doing good,” he mutters, shifting back down, so that he’s not leaning over Jacobi anymore, so that he’s back on his side of the bed. “Bring it back,” Kepler instructed. “Slowly.”

Jacobi takes in a sharp breath. “I don’t—need you to baby me.”

“You know me better than that,” Kepler says slowly and almost incredulously, hand trailing off from where it was petting the side of his head. “I’m not babying you.”

“You say that, Kepler, and yet I feel babied,” he snaps.

“Well, Miste— _ Jacobi _ —whatever you  _ feel _ is your own concern. I’m not babying you.”

Jacobi breathes in a long, deep breath, and then lets it out. He does this a few more times, until he’s sure that he can speak without his voice sounding weak. He hauls himself into a sitting position beside Kepler. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Kepler says softly. “Not you. Every time Dog moves, I wake up.”

“She knows the command to get off the bed.”

“I know.” Kepler takes a pause so long that Jacobi assumes he’s finished. “I prefer her there.” He shifts. “The more living things around me, the better.”

“Oh,” Jacobi says, looking down the bed at Dog, who has woken up and is sitting, alert, at the foot of the bed. “Yeah. Makes sense.” He pats his thigh, and she hauls herself up, slowly moving closer. Kepler reaches over and cups her ear with his hand, scratching behind it, and she knocks his face with her muzzle. Jacobi pats her side.

“She’s going to want a walk.”

“What’s better than a brisk winter jog at…” Kepler checks his watch. “Three thirty-two in the morning,” he finishes cheerily. Jacobi shoves him with an open palm. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i posted this while talking with my sister and forgot to title the chapter or add a description, whoops!


	7. Softly, my masters.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Chaos of the Hephaestus household

Kepler’s painted nails patter in rolling waves against the wheel of the car when the traffic gets bad, and Jacobi feels ungrounded watching them, strange and light in the arms and chest, like he’s flying, or falling.

“So,” Jacobi starts. Kepler turns his head just a bit, just to let Jacobi know that he’s paying attention. Dog rolls a little in the backseat. “You can’t start any fights up there.”

“I know,” he says mildly.

“You can’t. You also can’t respond to fights that other people try and start—”

“I know what’s expected of me,” Kepler says. “It’s not a surprise. It...makes…” there’s a long, incredibly long pause, where the road disappears beneath them as slowly as molasses into a bucket and the cars around them rumble gently. “...sense.”

“You weren’t invited,” Jacobi reminds him.

“I wasn’t disinvited.”

 _“I’m_ barely invited. They have their own thing going on.”

“Lovelace seems to like you.”

“Well, Hera doesn’t. Eiffel…who knows. Minkowski doesn’t, but she can put up with me. Her husband probably sides with her.”

“Her husband?”

“You’re not surprised,” Jacobi says, plain and disinterested

Kepler’s mouth twitches. “I’m not.”

“You like, really need to stop that.”

“Yes……….sir,” Kepler says at length, rolling his fingers again, inky black nails tapping.

Jacobi laughs. “Fuck’s sake—don’t pull that. I’m not trying to order you around, I’m saying that people don’t like being lied to.”

“I...know...that.” Kepler’s hands tighten on the wheel. “Jacobi.”

“Okay, but you still do it anyway, so? Whatever. Anyway, if you pull that kind of move at Minkowski’s I’m going to show your ass again.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No, it’s not a—oh my god. Kepler—”

“Jacobi.” He’s sounding less and less friendly.

“Kepler, I’m not _threatening_ you. I’m saying that if I catch you lying about stupid shit, I’m going to make it clear that you’re lying, because I’m….just...not interested in having to deal with that.”

Kepler says nothing. Jacobi grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“Ohhhh,” he groans, “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Kepler is not, apparently, kidding him.

“Look,” Jacobi says, “it’s just. This is just another aspect of being a decent human being, okay?”

“I know.”

Jacobi grabs his own hair at the root and tugs it in his fists, leaning forward. Kepler inclines his head slightly towards the passenger seat. “Why am I doing this? Why am I the person who is trying to teach you how to be decent? How does _that_ duty fall into _my_ lap? I can’t walk into a room without pissing someone off—I’m an asshole!”

 _“He that knows better how to tame a shrew,”_ Kepler says quietly, lifting his voice to something more musical, old and almost sweet.  _“Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show.”_

“Please don’t quote Shakespeare at me right now.”

“Sorry.” Kepler says almost quickly. “Like I said, I’ve got it memorized, it's hard not to think about it.” There’s a long, long break before he speaks again. “You’re not an asshole,” Kepler says.

Jacobi whips around, and gives Kepler a long, hard look. “Say that again,” he says.

Kepler winces. “Alright, you’re...a...somewhat...decent...person.”

Jacobi doesn’t look away.

“You’re...not...the...worst?”

Jacobi’s laugh is short, sharp, and incredulous. “This is going nowhere,” he says. “Thanks. Let’s just. Let’s just turn on the radio.”

 

* * *

 

Lovelace answers the door. Her hair is longer, and bundled into a thick braid, like how Maxwell used to do her own, but Lovelace’s hair is neater, more compact. She doesn’t smile at first, but she gives Jacobi a look, and there’s almost a softness in her gaze, almost. Her eyes slide over Kepler easily, and she reaches down to greet Dog, who putters over to meet her.

“Dog,” says Jacobi, “this is Lovelace. Lovelace, this is Dog.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Lovelace says, scratching Dog just under the jaw. Dog leans into it, and Jacobi calls her a good girl, because she is.

“Good to see you, Captain,” Jacobi says.

“It’s been a while. Get in here, everyone else is making themselves busy.”

“Lovelace,” Kepler says.

“Kepler,” Lovelace replies.

Dog scrambles up the stairs behind Lovelace, Jacobi follows suit, and behind them, he can hear the quiet thud of Kepler’s worn leather shoes.

At the door, a head and a thick burst of black hair pops up from around the threshold, and Lovelace pats his shoulder on the way in.

“Oh—” Eiffel says, getting a look at Jacobi—and then Kepler, “oh. So...you’re not. Dead.”

“Yet,” Kepler says amiably. “Nice to see you, Eiffel.” He takes a few steps forward, and offers his hand. Eiffel looks at it for a second and then, sighing, shakes it. Kepler smiles.

Jacobi thinks that Eiffel is looking healthier, maybe, but then the first time he’d met Eiffel, the man was starving and dehydrated and repeatedly cryogenically frozen to the point of incredible physical damage, and then entered from that mess back onto the massive stress-coffin that was the Hephaestus. It’s probably safe to assume that any other situation would be more conducive to health.

“This is Dog,” Jacobi says.

Eiffel winces at the name. “Nice to meet you,” he says, giving her a quick pat. “Minkowski’s locked herself in the kitchen with Hera and Dom. You probably shouldn’t go in there, I guess. Y’all got baggage?”

Jacobi snorts. “Oh boy,” Jacobi says. “Do I ever.”  Beside him, after a second’s delay, Kepler breathes in that short, sharp way he does when something is funny but he’s in Professional Mode. Eiffel starts rubbing his forehead.

“Just...a little. In the trunk. Just...show us where to put it.”

“Basement,” Eiffel mutters. “It’s less depressing than it sounds, pretty tricked-out, honestly.”

“I’m good with that,” Jacobi says. “Kepler, you wanna—”

“No problem,” Kepler says, ducking towards the door.

Eiffel looks after him for a moment, before looking down at Jacobi. “I thought you—actually, nevermind.”

“What.”

“Stupid question.”

“Well, now I have to know. What is it?”

“I, just, I thought you hated him?”

Jacobi laughs falsely with the sunny brightness of a man buoyed only by sarcasm. Ah. Yes. Not a stupid question, no, but Jacobi shouldn't have pestered anyway. “That, Eiffel, is really, really complicated. Rest assured, every time he says my name, I still have murder on my mind.”

Eiffel makes a face, but not one that speaks to reassurance so much as pain and discomfort. “Right,” he says tightly. Jacobi looks away.

“Sorry,” he says, so quiet that Eiffel might not have heard it at all (which is fine). “Not. Dead. I don’t want him dead. I’m—it’s a lot, but, it’s...I’m not actually going to kill him.”

“Right,” Eiffel says again, but this time, a little softer. “Well. I mean, I’m not eager to—”

There’s a pause while Eiffel tries to bridge that gap.

“Just, both of you be...careful, alright? This season is already pretty touch and go around here enough as it is, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says, feeling a little sick to his stomach. “No problem.”

 

 

* * *

 

Apparently, it’s movie night. He figures this out when Lovelace starts furiously patting the couch next to her, and, out of habit, Jacobi comes and takes that spot. “Movie night,” she says. Dog hops up on the couch next to her, and then crawls across Lovelace’s lap to thrust her head under Jacobi’s arms, and splay out over the two of them.

Jacobi laughs, and rubs her stomach, patting her side. “What a good girl,” he says.

“I feel like you say she’s a good girl no matter what she does,” Lovelace says, shooting him a playful smile.

“Baseless accusations. I tell her she’s bad when she’s being bad.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, it just so happens that she’s never actually been bad, ever. She’s perfect, and it’s not my fault.” Dog gently takes his hand in her mouth, and then lets go, and then starts licking at it. “I did my best,” he says. “I tried to teach her how to be awful, but she just wouldn’t go for it.”

“How _disappointing_ ,” Lovelace says.

“She’s extremely stubborn.”

Kepler, (who has been sitting at the table across the room, dutifully reading a ridiculous looking 80’s scifi paperback he plucked off the shelf) takes this moment to speak up. He’d been tailing Jacobi around the house all day like a lost puppy (or, more accurately, in the same way that Jacobi and Maxwell had trailed after him at the mandatory holiday parties), and since Jacobi’s settled himself in the living room, Kepler’s taken his position at the far end of the room with a book.

“She bites, sometimes.” He says encouragingly.

“Nibbles, really” Jacobi sighs, gesturing to Dog teething on his hand.

Lovelace huffs her amusement, and gives Dog another vigorous stomach rub. “Well, that’s better than nothing.”

There’s a hooting noise from just outside the room, and then Eiffel bursts in, “Happy to be the bearer of good news,” he says cheerfully, “we are _back_ , baby!”

“Eiffel found the movie,” says a voice from a speaker right above them. “I’m just going to say that it was under the armoire, like I told him.”

Jacobi jumped despite himself. “Hera?”

“Jacobi.” She says his name plainly, without affectation of any kind.

“I didn’t...know you were here.”

“I was a little busy,” she says, even though they both know that she wasn’t too busy.

Eiffel’s smile is still in place, but it’s looking stiff, and Lovelace is watching Jacobi carefully, only looking away to catch the disk-case Eiffel throws to her.

“I’m gonna get Renée and Dom, you guys just...chill here. Back in a jiffy.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Hi,” Minkowski’s husband says, extending his hand. “I’m Dominik Koudelka, you can call me Dom, if you like.”

Jacobi takes his hand, tests his grip, and gives Dominik’s hand two vigorous pumps. “Thanks, I’m Jacobi. I’m sure you’ve heard of me?”

Eiffel gives him a look, but Dominik smiles opaquely. “A little. Good to meet you.”

Minkowski enters a moment later with a massive bowl of popcorn, prompting another hearty whoop from Eiffel and an appreciative _“Hell yes, Renée,”_ from Lovelace.

“Just a little something for movie night,” she says, taking a seat between Dominik and Lovelace.

“Hey, Minkowski.”

“Hey, Jacobi. How was the trip up?”

“Long, Kepler did most of the driving.”

She hums, and looks across the room, where Kepler is still holding the book open and pretending that he’s not listening in.

“This is Dog,” Lovelace cuts in.

“Dog, huh?”

“I’m extremely creative,” Jacobi says, “and talented at naming things.”

“That is…”Minkowski takes a breath. “It sure is...very you.”

“Thanks.”

“If the audience could give us their attention for a minute,” Eiffel says around a mouthful of popcorn. “We ready?”

“Born ready,” Dominik says.

“Now _that_ is the kind of enthusiasm I like to hear,” Eiffel jams his thumb down on the remote, and the movie selection screen disappears.

 

* * *

 

It’s a bright animated movie where a square, silent boy makes friends with a wild, tall girl, which is why Jacobi expects it to be happy, and why he’s absolutely blindsided when they grow old, the woman dies, and her square husband is left behind alone and clearly miserable. “Isn’t this Disney?” He whispers into Lovelace’s ear. “We’re like, two minutes in. Why are people dying?”

“Shhhh,” she whispers back, patting his arm. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”  


* * *

 

Just after the old man lets the kid in, Minkowski grabs the remote and hits pause. Eiffel turns from where he’s splayed on the floor, and Lovelace mouths something that Jacobi can’t catch at the angle he’s at.

“Kepler,” she says resignedly, “get over here.”

Kepler looks up from his book, as though he hasn’t been pretending to read in a dark room, at night. He moves as though he’s about to say something.

“Only Pryce’s eyes are that good,” Minkowski says firmly.

Kepler nods slowly, and stands, gracefully walking to the couch He takes a seat on the floor, just in front of Jacobi, so that when he leans back, he leans into Jacobi’s knees. Dog scrambles a little closer, and starts licking his ear, and he playfully shakes her off.

Jacobi pulls one of the stiff couch-pillows out from under him, and passes it to Kepler, who slides it behind his lower back.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Minkowski repositions herself. “We all good? Good. Let’s get back into it.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a good movie.

When the old man goes to rescue the kid, and he hears a knock at the door, and it’s the dog, Jacobi has a feeling.

When the dog says “I was hiding under your porch because I love you. Can I stay?” Jacobi experiences another feeling.

When the old man barely takes a second before replying “Can you stay? Well, you're my dog, aren't you? And I'm your master!” Jacobi becomes convinced that, as he has experienced the majority of his emotional range in one minute, this fucking movie might be enough to kill him.

 

“Good boy, Dug!” The old man says, “You're a good boy!”

 

He breathes in such an unstable breath that Kepler leans back to get a look at him, make sure he hasn’t suffered a heart attack or something. Instead of telling him to fuck off, Jacobi shoves Kepler’s head forward roughly. He can feel (rather than hear) Kepler’s laughter shaking through his hand.

“Hey,” Lovelace warns.

Jacobi bites down on his twitching lip and leans back.

 

* * *

  


The basement has a bed, and a couch. Jacobi and Kepler stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and look at the couch for a moment.

“So,” Jacobi says.

“What a pity,” Kepler replies. He steps away, and lifts Dog in his arms. She makes a surprised noise, and bobbles her head a little as he moves her up onto the couch and puts her down upon it. “Dog seems to have...claimed the couch. We may have to share the bed, Jacobi.”

Jacobi slaps Kepler heartilly on the shoulder.“I don’t know how I ever took you seriously.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now i fear ill have to slow down just slightly—the last two chapters are not complete


End file.
